Enemy Territory By Issue Guest Editor Daniel Tucker

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.1 Turn the becomes more ameliorative, but for many proverb around a time or two and you might artists the possibility of using art to engage be able to locate yourself and your allies in the conflict is increasingly urgent. We hope that by confusing terrain of the present. sharing these examples we can all learn what crossing these lines can lead to, and to move The question of how to define an enemy as from healing to accountability. Furthermore, distinct from a friend has been a longstanding knowing this issue was coming out on the preoccupation of politics. Today, some eve of the 2020 elections in the U.S., in the conventions for deciphering alliances have midst of a global coronavirus pandemic, become complicated. For instance, you can’t and in conversation with a wave of uprisings look into someone’s eye or shake their hand against racial injustice, we felt it all the more while safely practicing physical distancing, important to include cultural practitioners and still others are intensified as the ability who may not all define themselves as socially to track a person’s positions through the engaged artists, but who encompass a wide convoluted archive that is the internet. Those range of collaborative creative practices that ideological signposts that render some as seek to confront facist tendencies and redress perpetrators of oppression and others sided the trauma of historical violence. with the angels have also experienced some surprising movements in the current climate Our historical reprint for this issue is Grupo de as fundamental concepts of health and safety Arte Callejero’s (GAC) writing from a decade encourage surprising alliances. In this moment, ago, just released last year for the first time masking has become an electoral issue and in English by Common Notions press. GAC the movement upsurges following the murders has been working together for over twenty of Black civilians by police have forced a years and has honed a practice of organizing reckoning with racist conceptions of justice communities to use street and protest art from every imaginable form of organization. to publicize and confront perpetrators of And turning the question on oneself to Argentina’s military dictatorship in their midst. examine complicity has become a worthy and dizzying preoccupation of the moment as Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger was interviewed sometimes the most urgent question can be by Prerana Reddy about his Settlement project, what if my friends’s enemy is me? designed to bring Indigenous artists from North America and the Pacific to reverse- In this issue of A Blade of Grass Magazine, occupy the town of Plymouth, U.K., where the we engaged an inspiring group of thinkers original Mayflower ship set sail 400-years-ago. and makers to consider what it looks like The wide-ranging interview covers Luger’s for various socially engaged art practices increasingly collective practice leading up to to venture into enemy territory. As Settlement and how the project had to pivot in socially-engaged art has become more the context of the pandemic. institutionalized, the risk has been that it

1. Variously attributed to 400 BC India to Kautilya or 19th century France to Gabriel Manigault Movement journalist Neesha Powell- The issue concludes with artist and organizer Twagirumukiza explores how communities Carol Zou performing as a modern-day Martin in Georgia, Ohio, and Florida have partnered Luther by drafting nine bold theses for debate with the Equal Justice Initiative’s engagement around reproductive labor inspired by the efforts to mark the sites where Black residents crisis of care and work that has infected our were lynched. The story is framed by the lives alongside the pandemic. recent chase and murder of Ahmaud Arbery by vigilantes in the Georgia region where the When you find yourself in enemy territory, it author was born and raised, and the dramatic is best to have some friends. The contributors rise of movements celebrating Black life and who brought their generous engagement with opposing police brutality and white supremacy. this issue are unified in a symbolic framing that brings their complex experiences together. In Connecting to Powell-Twagirumukiza’s essay, this temporary association, there are ideas this issue’s guest editor Daniel Tucker shares for ways to confront white supremacy in its scenes from the last five-years of actions most violent and viral forms. They also give related to monuments commemorating the us models for how artists can take on state- Confederacy and police brutality. The piece sponsored disappearances at the neighborhood considers experiments such as Monument Lab, level and how to reverse-engineer settler Paper Monuments, Chicago Torture Justice colonial movements. They help us understand Memorials, and the “Haymarket 8-Hour Action that these fights are in psychic and symbolic Series” as ephemeral and process-based territories as much as physical ones, and that strategies for memorializing conflicts. “winning” is not always about defeating our enemies, but about generating more active Journalist and filmmaker Michael Premo’s accomplices. And yet, alliances can be tenuous interview with filmmaker Arthur Jones offers unless the work is done to consider what insight into a new film that follows the heels makes them cohere or contradict. It is our hope of cartoon character Pepe the Frog from that with this issue, reflected and refracting ambiguous slacker to a right-wing meme off one another, these words offer ideas for charged with hate on 4chan. Tracking the frog’s new and deeper forms of affinity. We need trajectory, we see what happens when the friendships worth fighting for. original illustrator, Matt Furie, has to confront his social responsibility and Jones shares what Acknowledgments it took to enter into the online depths of the alt-right. I’m lucky to join the A Blade of Grass team in making this project a reality: Vicki Capote, Amita Swadhin’s writing on her oral history Sabrina Chin, Deborah Fisher, Kathryn project Mirror Memoirs asks what happens McKinney, Karina Muranaga, and Prerana when the remedy is the enemy? Sharing the Reddy. It has been a pleasure working with stories of victims of childhood sexual violence the team and in particular the tireless work and their experiences of violence is further of the editorial team has made the thinking compounded within the very social work through this complex subject matter always and justice systems intended to assist them. stimulating. Cannupa Hanska Luger Without restorative justice practices designed The One Who Checks & The One Who Balances by survivors and an understanding that Thank you to Mia Henry, Lewis Wallace, Anna 2018-ongoing (Monster Slayer) perpetrators are often also victims of violence Simonton, Danielle Purifoy, AC Thompson, and Site-specific land acknowledgement, themselves, these legally rehabilitative Malav Kanuga for their help lining up content Taos, NM. Photo by Dylan McLaughlin programs do more harm than good. for this issue. Regalia: beadwork, surplus industrial felt, ceramic, riot gear, afghan Contributors

GRUPO DE ARTE CALLEJERO (GAC) is inaugural Burke Prize. See more from the artist and a NYSCA Individual Artist Award. Michael DANIEL TUCKER works as an artist, currently made up of Lorena Bossi, Carolina at www.cannupahanska.com and on instagram at is on the Board of Trustees of A Blade of Grass. writer, educator, and organizer developing Golder, Mariana Corral, Vanesa Bossi and @cannupahanska. documentaries, publications, classes, exhibitions Fernanda Carrizo, who all live and work in PRERANA REDDY is Director of Programs and events inspired by his interest in social Buenos Aires. The group was formed in 1997 ARTHUR JONES has art directed animation and at A Blade of Grass. Previously she was the movements and the people and places from in Buenos Aires, by a small group of Fine Arts motion graphics for journalists and documentary Director of Public Programs & Community which they emerge. His writings and lectures students. Their first interventions ranged from filmmakers at news outlets like the New York Engagement for the Queens Museum in New on the intersections of art and politics and his mural-graffiti to actions on advertising posters. Times, Vice, the Center for Investigative York City from 2005–2018, where she organized collaborative art projects have been published In 1998, they began participating in the escraches Reporting, and the International Consortium of both exhibition-related and community-based and presented widely and are documented on of the group H.I.J.O.S., creating a type of public Journalists. Feels Good Man is his directorial programs as well as public art commissions. the archive miscprojects.com. He is currently complaint signage in the form of mock street debut. In addition, she oversaw a cultural organizing curator-in-residence at Mural Arts Philadelphia signs. In 1999, they won a sculpture competition initiative for Corona, Queens residents and in 2019, he completed a nine city tour of for the city’s Remembrance Park with their work NEESHA POWELL-TWAGIRUMUKIZA that resulted in the creation and ongoing the curatorial project Organize Your Own: The Posters of Memory, which remains in the park is a Southern storyteller who conspires in the programming of a public plaza and a popular Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination today. The formats chosen for their interventions name of liberated Black futures, queer and education center for new immigrants. She is Movements. He works as an Assistant Professor include installation, graphics, performance and transgender Black/Indigenous/people of color currently on the NYC Department of Cultural and Graduate Program Director in Socially- video. They have worked collaboratively with power, solidarity economics, transformative Affairs Advisory Commission and sits on the Engaged Art at Moore College of Art & Design. human rights organizations, independent unions, justice, and community accountability. Powell- boards of NOCD-NY, ArtBuilt, Rockaway non-partisan political groups, organizations Twagirumukiza’s writing has been published in Initiative for Sustainability & Equity, and New CAROL ZOU facilitates creative social change serving the unemployed, and research groups in various online and print publications, including Immigrant Community Empowerment. projects with a focus on racial justice, informal various areas of culture. In 2009, they published Autostraddle, Bitch, Prism, Rewire.News, labor, and public space. She is a reproductive the book Thoughts, Practices and Actions of the Scalawag, VICE, YES Magazine!, and Monday: AMITA SWADHIN is an educator, storyteller, laborer, insofar as joy, connection, creativity, GAC, Ed. Tinta Limón. http://archive.org/details/ the Journal of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery. activist, and consultant dedicated to fighting social change, and being the “cool aunt” GacPensamientosPracticasYAcciones They are a MFA in Creative Writing candidate interpersonal and institutional violence against constitutes reproductive labor. Current and at Georgia College & State University and young people. Their commitments and approach past affiliations include: Yarn Bombing Los CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER is a multi- graduated from the University of Georgia with to this work stem from their experiences as a Angeles, Michelada Think Tank, Trans.lation disciplinary artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, a B.A. in Journalism & Mass Communication. genderqueer, femme queer woman of color, Vickery Meadow, Project Row Houses with the Lakota, and European descent. Using social Tweet with Neesha @womanistbae. daughter of immigrants, and years of abuse by University of Houston, Asian Arts Initiative, collaboration and in response to timely and site- their parents, including eight years of rape by their American Monument, Imagining America, U.S. specific issues, Luger produces multi-pronged MICHAEL PREMO is a journalist and artist father. They are a frequent speaker at colleges, Department of Arts and Culture, Spa Embassy, projects that take many forms, provoking diverse whose film, radio, theater, and photo-based conferences, and community organizations and Enterprise Community Partners with Little publics to engage with Indigenous peoples and work has been exhibited and broadcast in the nationwide, and a consultant with over fifteen Tokyo Service Center. She believes that we are values apart from the lens of colonial social United States and abroad. In addition to his years of experience in nonprofits serving low- most free when we help others get free. structuring. Luger lectures and participates in work as Executive Producer at Storyline, he has income, immigrant, and LGBTQ youth of color in residencies and projects around the globe and his created original work with numerous companies Los Angeles and New York City. Amita’s writing work is collected internationally. He is a 2020 including Hip-Hop Theater Festival, The Foundry has been featured on The Feminist Wire and The Creative Capital Fellow, a 2020 Smithsonian Theater, The Civilians, and the Peabody Award- Huffington Post, and in the anthologies Dear Artist Research Fellow, and a recipient of the winning StoryCorps. Michael’s photography has Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence 2020 A Blade Of Grass Fellowship for Socially appeared in publications like The Village Voice, (AK Press, 2014) and Queering Sexual Violence Engaged Art. He received a 2019 Joan Mitchell The New York Times, and Het Parool, among (Magnus Books, 2016). Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and was others. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital winner of the 2018 Museum of Arts and Design’s Award, A Blade of Grass Artist Files Fellowship, Whose Monuments: 40 Scenes of Tearing CONTENTS Down, Building Up, and Thinking Through Daniel Tucker

52 Reclaiming Pepe: Concepts and Practices of Documenting How a 8 Justice: Experiences from Hate Symbol Gets Made the Mesa de Escrache and Unmade Arthur Jones Grupo de Arte Callejero & Michael Premo

Un-Settling the Colonial Changing the Narrative on 22 Impulse: Contemporary 62 Childhood Sexual Abuse Indigenous Artists Engage Amita Swadhin Plymouth Cannupa Hanska Luger & Prerana Reddy 9 Theses on Pandemic 74 and Reproductive Labor Names Not Lost: Carol Zou 32 Racial Terror Lynching, Past and Present Neesha Powell-Twagirumukiza Concepts & Practices of Justice

Experiences from the Mesa de Escrache

Grupo de Arte Callejero

This excerpt was reprinted with permission from the bookGrupo de Arte Callejero: Thoughts, Practices, and Actions (Common Notions, October 2019), which was first published in Spanish in 2009. This version was translated by Mareada Rosa Translation Collective.

Opposite: “If there is not justice, there is escrache.” GAC’s first mobile escrache travels past the homes of various genociders of the military dictatorship. December 11, 1999. Photo courtesy of the Grupo de Arte Callejero Archive. 8 9 Argentine President Isabel Perón was overthrown in 1976 in a The Escraches: A Brief History The objective was not simply the number right-wing coup d’état and replaced by a military junta. From 1976 of people who joined the march of the The first escraches in Argentina were realized escrache, but rather to favor construction to 1983, the right-wing, paramilitary death squad Triple A (Alianza by the group H.I.J.O.S.,1 which emerged in 1995 in the neighborhood through preliminary Anticomunista Argentina, the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) out of the need to denounce the impunity of activities in that space, respecting its “disappeared” thousands of men and women. With support from the institutional justice, namely the passage of the singularity, its tempos, and its subject matter. laws Obediencia Debida and Punto Final,2 as Beginning in 2001, the Mesa de Escrache Argentine military dictatorship, Triple A persecuted a wide variety well as the presidential pardons. Popular went into neighborhoods and began of leftist groups, political dissidents, and their sympathizers, and to build relationships with different social became a part of the deadly state apparatus under the first military The word escrache signifies in Argentine organizations, cultural centers, musical [slang] “to bring into the light something groups, student centers, and assemblies. Film junta, led by Jorge Rafael Videla. hidden” or “to reveal what power hides”: the series, talks, activities in schools and plazas, fact that our society lives with murderers, and open radio all took place. There was a The disappeared were often taken from their homes, held without torturers, and the kidnappers, who until this strong sense that the escrache was a form of legal recourse, detained, tortured, and assassinated—all without moment, lived their lives in a comfortable justice that broke with the representations of anonymity. institutional justice: a justice constructed by their families and communities’ ability to account for their absence people in the day to day via the repudiation or any grave that marked their death. The termdesaparecido was […] of the genocidist in the neighborhood, the coined to describe this particular phenomenon of political persecution reappropriation of politics, and the reflection At first, the escraches consisted of interrupting of the subject matter of the present. experienced during the dictatorship. Marking the end of the junta, in the workplaces or homes of a genocidist linked October 1983, Raúl Alfonsín was elected the President of Argentina to the dictatorship. Highly visible figures, such Starting in 2003, a new set of figures began and during his term established the National Commission on the as Astiz, Martínez de Hoz, Videla, and Massera, to be escrached: those who were complicit were chosen as paradigms of the repression. with the dictatorship and who continued to Disappearance of Persons to investigate the crimes committed by the It was necessary to appear in the media, so be professionally active. It began with the military. strategic dates were chosen. The objective was escrache against Héctor Vidal, a kidnapper to put the issue on the map, and we worked to of babies born in captivity and a falsifier spread the action in both the neighborhood of birth certificates, who was living freely of the escrache as well as in the city center. thanks to the laws of Obediencia Debida and The idea was for people to repudiate the Punto Final. Six months after the escrache, genocidists still on the loose, to create “social his medical license was revoked. In 2004, the condemnation,” and to question the absence priest Hugo Mario Bellavigna was escrached; of a legal punishment. The slogan became: “If he was the leader of the church of Santa Inés there is not justice, there is escrache.” (“Si no Virgen y Mártir, worked as a chaplain in the hay justicia hay escrache.”) women’s prison Devoto between 1978 and 1982, and was a member of the Comisión […] Interdisciplinaria para la Recuperabilidad de las Detenidas (Interdisciplinary Commission

1. H.I.J.O.S. stands for Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Children for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence) and comprised of advocates and children of desaparecidos’, many of whom were kidnapped by members of the Argentine military and then raised by other families. 2. Passed under President Raúl Alfonsín, the two laws prevented the prosecution of the perpetrators of state violence during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. Obediencia Debida stated that members of the military below colonel rank were exempt from prosecution because they were following orders. Punto Final set a very short statute of limitations for prosecutions of crimes. Both laws were ultimately overturned.

10 CONCEPTS & PRACTICES OF JUSTICE CONCEPTS & PRACTICES OF JUSTICE 11 Si no hay justicia If there is not justice, hay escrache there is escrache

GAC publicly puts on trial Emilio Massera, a leader of the military junta, in the retirement courts of Comodoro Py in the Buenos Aires Province with road signs that read, “Justice and Punishment.” March 19, 1998. Photo courtesy of the Grupo de Arte Callejero Archive.

12 CONCEPTS & PRACTICES OF JUSTICE CONCEPTS & PRACTICES OF JUSTICE 13 for the Rehabilitation of the Detained) where reify and individualize social problems, and prisoners were tortured and manipulated. which generate a spectacle represented in the In 2005, it was police captain Ernesto Sergio practice of justice. Weber’s turn. He participated in different repressive acts during the democratic period, […] The practice of the escrache centers on among them the repression that occurred directly outside the Legislature after the The process of the escrache interrupts living memory, which creates and acts, vote approving the Código Contravencional everyday life in the neighborhood. Having (Criminal Code); he was also responsible for picked a target, the Mesa de Escrache Popular the deaths during the repression in Buenos moves into the neighborhood where the generating political practices by means Aires on December 20, 2001. genocidist lives. Its arrival produces worry and curiosity, since every weekend the neighbors of joy, celebration, and reflection. see a group of people handing out info sheets Thinking Work in the explaining the criminal record of the next Neighborhoods target of the next escrache and inviting them to participate in the working group. The The Mesa de Escrache works from an idea group meets in a public space, which means of equality. Its practice aims at social that over time the neighbors get to know the condemnation, which asks for the participation members and know why they are there. The Day by day in the neighborhood, the practice While it is very important to do the escrache of society in general, and is oriented towards answers of the neighbors are varied and imply of the escrache constructs images that against the genocidist, at the same time an encounter between emotion and the desire distinct levels of participation. We understand mark the genocidist, removing him from his the escrache is an excuse to come to a for a just society. Its organizational structure participation in a broad sense, as the act of everyday anonymity. The walls begin to say, neighborhood and take on the problems of is reflected in each weekly meeting, where communicating events, for example, when a “There is a torturer in this neighborhood” and the present. From this place, we have worked opinions are exchanged and decisions are neighbor rings another neighbor’s doorbell “If there is no justice, there is escrache.” The together with neighbors on problems of made via consensus, with a clear tendency to tell her that a genocidist lives next door. neighbors are now on alert, receiving flyers housing, police violence, corruption in the towards horizontality. In this sense, the Another example would be the information and dialoguing with the participants in the courts, the fear of talking about the past, working group distances itself from every these same neighbors offer about the everyday escrache. The aesthetics of the neighborhood creating spaces of encounter, and reflection idea of political practice as that of individual practices of the genocidist (“He gets his hair change, symbolically cornering the genocidist: that relate the genocide to new problems. actors, where in an action some have more cut there;” “He eats breakfast every day at no neighbor can ignore what is occurring rights than others, or whose actions serve to such and such an hour in this bar;” “He is because when they leave the house there is […] create a spectacle of individual pain. As Alain friends with this guy,” etc.). a poster on an otherwise abandoned wall; Badiou notes, no politics will be just if the when they go to the store, there is a map Once it is time to move to other body is separated from the idea, even less if it The practice of the escrache generates clearly marking the home of the genocidist; neighborhoods, actors in the group and those is realized as a spectacle of the victim, since multiple interventions, including those by the when they throw a piece of paper into a public in the neighborhood will continue to discuss “no victim can be reduced to their suffering, family members, friends, and institutions that trash bin, there is already a sticker on the bin what occurred in this shared lived experience. within the victim it is humanity as a whole who defend the genocidist. There is, for example, a denouncing the genocidist; when they stroll is beaten.”3 constant tearing down of the posters with the through the neighborhood on the weekend, In this sense, we can understand the practice genocidist’s photograph, as well as telephone they confront a group of people discussing of the escrache as a possibility of opening For this reason, the practice of the escrache threats, accusations of defamation, and, in and denouncing genocidal practices. In this a process of political subjectivity, as it is centers on living memory, which creates and some cases, police persecution to intimidate way, the landscape of the neighborhood defined by [philosopher Jacques] Rancière: acts, generating political practices by means of and seize the belongings of those participating changes, giving expression to a social problem “An enactment of equality—the handling of joy, celebration, and reflection. It moves away in the escrache. that invades the furthest corners of the a wrong—by people who are together to the from the practices of judicial power, which neighborhood. extent that they are between.” 4

3. Alain Baidou, “The Idea of Justice,” conference presentation given on June 2, 2004, in the 4. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose Facultad de Humanidades y Artes in Rosario, Argentina. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 61.

14 CONCEPTS & PRACTICES OF JUSTICE CONCEPTS & PRACTICES OF JUSTICE 15 A “Genociders Live Here“ poster showing the addresses of those complicit with the 1976-1983 dictatorship. The poster was updated annually from 2002 to 2006. March 24, 2003. Photo courtesy of the Grupo de Arte Callejero Archive.

16 17 Escrache: The Use of the Image changing their meaning. The space being used is the same as the real spaces in the city: on the posts that one finds on the street. We sought […] to place the signs in spaces that were amply visible both to the passerby and to the driver. In the beginning, [Grupo de Arte Callejero was] These signs served as a spatial intervention participating from a slightly external position: in the city, losing and discovering themselves accompanying the process. Afterwards, we in the daily visual pollution, managing to contributed and involved ourselves more. Our infiltrate the framework of the city itself. participation was further increased when the activity of the escrache opened up completely The great transformation that was implied and Mesa de Escrache Popular was created. for us in thinking of the image in the escrache As such, the demands made visible by the concerned, on the one hand, language: the family members who were accompanied by idea of tweaking a determined code (urban others broadened and created a very powerful street signs). On the other hand, it was the idea political position, totally different from the of a temporal event that was repeated as a forms or traditional spaces belonging to carnivalesque interruption of which the signs parties or unions. At that time, we felt the need were the trace, that which remained “after.” to mark and signal the spaces in the city that The temporality of the escrache made possible had served as CCDs (clandestine detention the emergence of a type of serial image that centers), thinking of the nonvisibility of those reappeared each time. Besides marking the spaces and the ways in which they were or path, the signs mark a time, intervals of time, were not recognized by people passing by. between escrache and non-escrache, and We proposed working on the physical spaces also between the escrache and other spaces of state terrorism and their invisibility with where the same signs appeared copied by the objective of unveiling the subjects (by other groups. Perhaps for this reason we can means of an escrache) who participated in the consider all of the projects where signs were dictatorship. We took into account that the deployed as a large conceptual unit that spans majority of the CCDs were not built specifically from the group’s beginning to the present day. to be used for the dictatorship, but rather that commissaries, military offices, and public buildings were recycled for the purposes of Walking Justice repression and extermination. For this very reason, in order to signal these spaces and […] make them visible, the experience of the escrache was helpful. With the arrival of the government of Kirchner and, in June 2005, the annulment of the […] Obediencia Debida and Punto Final laws, a new moment emerged in the prosecutions Our contribution is in the thinking through of the dictatorship and with this, a shift in and making of images in relation to the energy position regarding social organizations and that working on the escrache generated. From movements. The question was raised: with GAC’s urban interventions use the language of street signs as part of the beginning, we chose to use the aesthetic these new trials, would the escraches end? Our the escrache of Emilio Massera. The signs identify him as a genocider of signage, using mock street signs (made of thinking was that the practice of the Mesa was and list his street address. March 23, 1998. Photo courtesy of the Grupo wood painted with acrylics, printed using silk a kind of social work, starting from thinking de Arte Callejero Archive. screens or stencils), to subvert the real codes: of the genocide not as an individual condition maintaining colors and icons but completely but as a collective one. The answer then was

18 CONCEPTS & PRACTICES OF JUSTICE CONCEPTS & PRACTICES OF JUSTICE 19 that in the best of all possible outcomes, if all a transformation: it is a collective present of the military repressors were put in prison, the a subjective transformation, as a process of process of the escrache would still continue, construction of a new body fighting against the because its principal objective was to reflect social alienation of present-day capitalism. on the social transformations and the rupture of the network of intersubjective relations produced by the genocide in order to also Grupo de Arte Callejero is a Buenos Aires-based address current social conflicts. In this way, collective founded in 1997 that continues to work an idea of justice that distances itself from with human rights organizations, labor unions, the logic of institutional justice began to be non-partisan political groups, and research formed. groups.

[…]

This was an attempt to construct a social condemnation seeking the production of justice outside of institutions and constituted within the day-to-day life of the neighborhood via a process of reflecting on the past and present. The neighbors choose to not have genocidists as neighbors, and they demonstrated their repudiation of them. For An idea of justice that distances itself example: after meetings of the working group in a particular neighborhood and after the from the logic of institutional justice march of the escrache, a building association got together and asked the genocidist to move somewhere else because they didn’t want to live with him any longer.

[…]

This is how the Mesa proposes to transform vis-à-vis a “walking justice,” one connected to a knowledge of the past, which is considered along with the present. A walking of everyday justice, neither programmatic nor future- orientated, coinciding with Badiou’s notion that justice is the name of the capacity of bodies to carry ideas in the struggle against modern slavery, “to pass from the state of the victim to one who stands up.” Justice is

A “Genociders Live Here“ poster showing the addresses of those complicit with the 1976-1983 dictatorship. The poster was updated annually from 2002 to 2006. March 24, 2006. Photo courtesy of the Grupo de Arte Callejero Archive.

20 CONCEPTS & PRACTICES OF JUSTICE 21 Settlement is a radical performative encampment conceived of by contemporary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, in which Indigenous artists from across North America and the Pacific were invited to occupy Plymouth’s Central Park in the United Kingdom for four weeks in fall 2020. Settlement is a key Indigenous- led aspect of the Mayflower 400, a year-long multi-national cultural program that commemorates the 1620 voyage of the pilgrims to the “New World.” Un-Settling the The project aims to go beyond conversations around decolonization and actively practice Indigenization. We spoke to the artist to understand how it supports the descendants of the settlers in moving towards a more relational Colonial Impulse: understanding and acknowledgement of contemporary Indigeneity.

PRERANA REDDY: I wanted to start with Shield Project, to make something to protect Contemporary just a little bit of background about your art the water protectors on the front line. Going practice. You have previously mentioned the to the camps several times to deliver supplies Indigenous Artists concept of individuality as being central to a and offer support, I witnessed the extreme Western way of thinking and commodification. brutality taking place. I wanted to create some I know your practice has increasingly moved form of protection that was also reflective, for Engage Plymouth from individual to collaborative, with other the police to witness themselves, and to assert artists such as for Settlement, but also the notion that we were protecting the water sometimes collaborative with movements. for everybody—including them.

CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER: What For the Mirror Shield Project, I used social really started to push me out of being just a media as a platform or call to action in order studio practice artist was the water protectors for the public to create the shields, and it gathering up at Standing Rock during [the changed something in my head. Honestly, movement against the] Dakota Access I never really looked at social media much Pipeline in 2016. I’m from Standing Rock. before, I didn’t understand what its point was, Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger As it was coming through, it was drawing but as all of this was unfolding and I saw its & Prerana Reddy in Conversation oil from the Reservation that I am enrolled power to amplify voices and to share people’s on. It was all so close to home, and so I situations, it became a profound resource. felt compelled to activate how I was able. I That river is wide and shallow though, you recognize that I have privilege as an artist: I know? What does “liking” and sharing actually have access to institutions, media sources, do? But giving people a task, it becomes an and influence with the larger public. Out of activation. Online everybody is an ally, but not pure desperation, I came up with the Mirror everybody knows how to be an accomplice. So if you create something you can embed into Cannupa Hanska Luger the movement, put some sweat equity into it, The One Who Checks & The One Who Balances, you shift from just an ally to an accomplice, 2018 - ongoing (Monster Slayer) you become invested. Site-specific land acknowledgement, Taos, NM Photo by Dylan McLaughlin Regalia: beadwork, surplus industrial felt, I’ve done several other projects since then ceramic, riot gear, afghan using that same model of large calls to action

22 UN-SETTLING THE COLONIAL IMPULSE 23 Mirror Shield Project at Oceti Sakowin camp, Standing Rock, ND 2016. Concept artist, Cannupa Hanska Cannupa Hanska Luger Luger, with drone operation and performance organization by Rory Wakemup. Image courtesy of MMIWQT Bead Project (Everyone), 2018 the artist. The artist thanks Jack Becker from Forecast Public Art for helping bring Mirror Shields to Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM Standing Rock and Rory Wakemup at All My Relations Arts in Minneapolis, MN, who facilitated a Photo courtesy of the artist workshop, hosting Luger as guest artist for the Mirror Shield Project. through social media. Every One (2018) was Especially data that actually creates policies gaze, and to popular culture in America, we voyage, and what does it mean to be invited as a large scale clay work representing missing for change or structures of accountability. are seen as one-dimensional characters. an element of that commemoration? How did and murdered Indigenous women, queer, And the only way to really learn and to grow that invitation come to you? and trans relatives, in which hundreds of And so, when I was invited to engage in a large and to appreciate Indigenous peoples is to communities from across the U.S. and Canada scale project in Europe to build Settlement in recognize our complexity. So for Settlement, I CANNUPA: A group from Plymouth, U.K. created and sent over 4,000 ceramic beads, Plymouth, U.K., one of the things that I wanted wanted to bring together as many Indigenous called The Consciousness Sisters reached which I then used to complete the physical to dispel was the notion that Native Americans artists, philosophers, and radical thinkers as I out to me and asked if I would be interested work. And I currently have a project in process are just one people. The idea of the Native could support to be in conversation with one in doing something contemporary in called Something to Hold Onto (2020), calling American as a singular group is inaccurate; another, for us to contradict one another and relationship to the Mayflower 400, where a for over 7,000 unfired clay beads which will this massive umbrella term actually represents be honest. lot of the programming being developed was be strung together to create a continuous nearly 600 diverse tribal communities, with commemorating historical events. I was like, strand, representing the lives lost on ancestral hundreds of language groups, hundreds of PRERANA: So just to step back and talk “No, I don’t think so. Why are you asking me?” migratory routes of Indigenous peoples different cultural practices, songs, dances, about Mayflower 400, this multi-national See the Pilgrims never made it to my people of affected by imposed borders. These works and different scientific and cosmological commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the Plains region. There is no ocean where I’m attempt to make sense out of unfathomable backgrounds. Yet under this umbrella we the Mayflower voyage. What does that mean from, you know. We weren’t engaging with the data, it’s an attempt to re-humanized data. become homogenized under the European to Plymouth itself as the starting point of that West until the 1800s.

24 UN-SETTLING THE COLONIAL IMPULSE UN-SETTLING THE COLONIAL IMPULSE 25 Then I started thinking about the effect of consensus rather than a curator or lead artist how the only representation of Native people telling everybody what they should and Almost every is so often us in buckskins and feathers—as shouldn’t do. It takes longer to do this process historical. Almost every time I’ve gone to than to simply dictate to somebody what they time I’ve gone Europe, somebody has said, “You don’t look should do. I kept telling all of the artists, “Look, Native American to me.” And I’m like, “I’m the fact that we’re going and doing this at all not. There is no such thing.” So I decided is amazing. That’s the work. What we present, to Europe, to work on the project in order to create that’s all bonus, that’s cream.” That kind of something hyper-contemporary, to show us alleviated any sort of pressure on each artist to somebody as we are: complicated, complex, intelligent, be performative—showing up and witnessing and hard to perish. Building a settlement on each other, was the real work. has said, the grounds of Plymouth’s Central Park and doing an Indigenous creative occupation And now that this global pandemic is a part of would be a great opportunity to flip the our piece, there’s something ironic about it all, narrative of the Mayflower 400 program. as far as how Native people and pandemics go. “You don’t Rather than commemorating 400 years of Like how come it’s always got to be a bug! colonialism, we would acknowledge how those first efforts affected tribal communities PRERANA: This was supposed to happen in look Native across all of America and into the Pacific. The person in July and August 2020 and before we Wampanoag [on whose territory the Pilgrims go into how that changed, I wanted to touch American to landed] already had representation [in this upon another thing, which was the community commemoration] as one of the host nations for engagement piece. There were meant to be me.” the Mayflower 400, so with Settlement I wanted local engagements outside of the encampment to bring the varied contemporary stories of itself, right? Indigenous peoples within that 400 year period who were also deeply affected by colonization CANNUPA: What was really interesting And I’m like, and who continue to also thrive despite. Ginger about working in Plymouth, is the fact that Dunnill, the U.S. producer of the project, and Plymouthians do not care about the pilgrims. I started to look for artists, and we ended Pilgrims were the people that they asked up with 28! Everyone was really excited to to leave because they were so puritanical. show the complexity and the contradictions Americans are the only ones who give a damn “I’m not. of thought, philosophy, song, dance, and about the pilgrims, as their forefathers. It’s all then to produce work together through a embedded in the American mythos. Rather There is no contemporary lens. than bringing American tourists to Plymouth, we were bringing American artists to Plymouth such thing.” PRERANA: One of the other things that to engage with Plymouthians, to engage with was interesting to me was the process of that Europeans, to engage with the British. All collaboration. How you all decided collectively the development work I had done over two what to do, and maintain a certain kind of years, traveling to Plymouth, engaging with individual sense of your own work but also, different communities out there, it was just a how are all these things fitting together; how slightly different model. This project had to are people working together? be for us as Indigenous people primarily, and

CANNUPA: Yes, this project challenges Production images from artist films created for Settlement digital occupation. Images courtesy of Western ways of thinking and organizing that Red Brigade Films and Razelle Benally. Artists from we are subject to all the time as artists. We top to bottom: Haley Greenfeather English, Raven wanted to develop programming through Chacon, and Nanibah Chacon.

26 UN-SETTLING THE COLONIAL IMPULSE UN-SETTLING THE COLONIAL IMPULSE 27 then whatever that experience could become the understanding of extractive colonialism, what I’ve experienced as a human being is that I’m trying onsite would be shared with the communities the removal of resources, that’s not as openly we have created a system that reinforces the at large. And those from Plymouth who were and commonly understood. With Settlement, idea that power equals strength. Somewhere interested could come and participate to we have been dealing with the U.K. in the along the line, we all decided to agree that to figure out create something with us as artists, rather than middle of Brexit. That effort to try to close its power was strength, and that was the birth be voyeuristic. Let’s get engaged. The whole borders to outside places. Ironically, Plymouth of patriarchy. If strength is power, then the how we can thing wasn’t extractive, even to the British itself is a city that almost every single settler male form has some sort of dominant role community. colonial and extractive colonial voyage from over everything to wield that power. But the U.K. took off from. The boats were all built I can’t bench press a child into the world. make people PRERANA: We talked about the high there, and that’s where everybody stopped Power is something that’s much greater than roading concept, how not to be extractive, and before they headed out into the world. strength. And confrontation reinforces the idea recognize that how not to fit into this system that stereotypes of strength as power, but to nurture, and to Native Americans. How do you prepare to be Simultaneously, looking at the Welsh, looking care, and to support people through their own the world is in in this moment of commemoration around at the Celts, looking at the original inhabitants trauma, I think has a lot more to do with the people who may or may not acknowledge of that land, what was really triggering for me primary powers of our world, which is creation that history in the same way? And how do you was recognizing that they have been colonized and empathy. process and prepare for both the potential for trauma and a lot longer than anybody else. It’s embedded the potential for healing around the fact that in their history, and they don’t even recognize PRERANA: I think the sense of generosity, that it is not a you will be having agency in that space? the toxicity of it because it’s happened for so and that meeting with some sort of, not long that it’s been perpetuated as their cultural necessarily equality, but meeting somewhere CANNUPA: There’s a growing model. And that colonization has been going where you both have stakes seems to be what dictionary of understanding of the negative impacts of on for about 5,000 years. So, how are you you were trying to build. And that is actually settler colonialism around the globe, and the expected to be fully open to communication healing and generative. It’s not like something nouns. lasting toxic effects of colonialism socially. But and dialogue under the weight of that trauma? was done to me, and now I’m going to make you feel bad about it. They have started doing all these projects in Plymouth to amplify their Celtic traditions, the CANNUPA: Yeah, it’s more so like, primary people of that region. Catalyzed by the something bad has happened to all of us, Settlement project, members of the Plymouth you know, somewhere along the ancestral community have been making traditional wool lines. And we have been playing this game fiber and other craft and researching their of telephone with that bad situation for so Indigenous plant medicines, ceremony, and long that we forget that we are all deeply regalia. They are working with students within traumatized by it, we are all suffering from the primary schools, learning about their place it. And even if one person is suffering, we are and their people and their belonging to that all suffering. I’m trying to figure out how we land from a cultural standpoint. I thought that can make people recognize that the world it was really important that they get in touch is in process and that it is not a dictionary of with their own heritages, myths, and legends nouns. Everything seems to be or is subject to instead of exotifying the umbrella of Native something, but that’s not what it is—we are American culture to fill that void. I think this all not those things, we are subject to situations. has sparked something in them as a people that Even that notion of equity and equality is could heal some deep trauma into the future. inherently a power dynamic: equal to what? I’m not looking for equality, I’m looking for We all have trauma and to confront it is, well, somebody to listen, to witness, that’s it. confrontational. Power is being vulnerable enough to work to heal your trauma in real PRERANA: Well, with that I’m going to

Pounds House, a historical mansion in Plymouth, UK, was mansion in Plymouth, UK, was House, a historical Pounds . Settlement for of activation site be the physical planned to UK producer. Settlement of Fiona Evans, courtesy Image time with your community, to confront it. But ask you how your plans have had to change.

28 UN-SETTLING THE COLONIAL IMPULSE UN-SETTLING THE COLONIAL IMPULSE 29 Traveling is not possible to Europe right now. project this time with the Mayflower 400 in the Obviously the idea of this tourist attraction has U.K. under the premise that this is just the first changed, and your project is not about that step, and it could potentially be something that aspect anyway. But what does it mean to have is bigger than us. What if this became a model this not be, to the extent that you had planned, for every country around the world that’s been a physical manifestation? And what will it be? subject to colonialism, and settler colonialism, to create an opportunity to develop a CANNUPA: We are moving forward with the settlement? A temporary creative occupation project as a digital occupation. This October, of the colonial landscape. And I would really Settlement will be going live online, and we be interested to see what that looked like from will have the work of 28 artists indigenous to other cultures and other communities, and to North America and the Pacific represented. The experience that myself, as somebody outside online platform will be a space for Indigenous of it. I would just love to see it from another artists to activate a creative response and perspective, where I’d just be like, “Oh, this is claiming of digital space to consider the so righteous. This is a good way forward.” impacts of colonisation on a diverse number of tribal nations who continue to thrive despite its long term effects. Across the winter, the Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multi-disciplinary online platform will include performance, artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and artist discussions, and social engagement European descent. opportunities. Through innovative media approaches of idea sharing, our art practices Prerana Reddy is Director of Programs at A Blade can reach an even larger global audience. This of Grass. digital occupation is a space to map our stories, on our terms, in a landscape unhindered by AN INDIGENOUS DIGITAL OCCUPATION borders. I hope this work will create a living archive for contemporary Indigenous artists PREMIERES — 13 OCTOBER 2020 and that global investors would consider hosting this project in their region. We were www.sttlmnt.org @settlement_uk talking about doing it again here in Alcatraz. And have the same kind of concept and approach, but engage with our oppressor.

PRERANA: And also, it’s a reoccupation at Alcatraz at that point, right, so it connects to the whole American Indian Movement history. Dayna Danger Sterlin Harjo Nanibah & Autumn Chacon CANNUPA: Yeah. And there was traction Demian DinéYazhi’ Marie Watt Rory Wakemup Raven Chacon Eric-Paul Riege Dakota Camacho in that scenario, and it’s still a possibility. & Candice Hopkins Tania Larsson Jade Begay & Stina Hamlin Honestly, I always thought about this Cannupa Hanska Luger Raven Halfmoon Razelle Benally Settlement project with the two definitions Laura Ortman Elisa Lorraine Harkins Kathy Whitman of settlement in mind, both the legal and the Sonya Kelliher-Combs Haley Greenfeather English Ian Kuali’i physical. To come to some sort of consensus Tania Willard Katherine Paul Dylan McLaughlin through engagement and communication is Emily Johnson Christine Howard Sandoval how you come to a settlement. It’s an official Jeremy Dennis Santiago X agreement intended to resolve a dispute or BY WORKS FEATURING Yatika Starr Fields Nicholas Galanin conflict. I’m really interested in doing the

Image courtesy of Red Brigade Films and Razelle Benally filming for Settlement digital occupation, 2020 30 UN-SETTLING THE COLONIAL IMPULSE 31 A mural memorializing Ahmaud Arbery by artist Marvin Weeks painted on the building that will become the Brunswick African American Cultural Center at 1621 Albany Street. Photo by Jud McCranie/ Wikimedia Commons. NAMES NOT LOST RACIAL TERROR LYNCHING, PAST AND PRESENT

Neesha Powell-Twagirumukiza

32 33 A MURAL of a smiling Black boy wearing a are being forced to reckon with systemic and tuxedo spans the side of a two-story building institutional racism, along with symbols of constructed in the 1950s out of concrete white supremacy. The refrain has been painted and oyster shells. His face is imposed on top on the street in front of the White House and of splashes of blue and gold. The building, Trump Tower in New York City, among myriad located at 1621 Albany Street, Brunswick, other places. Meanwhile, statues of colonizers Georgia, was neglected for two decades, with and slave owners are rapidly being removed, past lives as a nightclub and a cultural center. by law and by force. Christopher Columbus But due to the tragic fate of the mural’s subject, statues are having a particularly rough year. Ahmaud Arbery, it’s now poised to become a community hub once again: the Brunswick African American Cultural Center. Painted by It’s clear that communities are ready Brunswick-bred artist Marvin Weeks, the mural to envision what and who should be signifies hope in the small coastal city still reeling from the February 23, 2020 killing of commemorated in public spaces in 25-year-old Arbery by a mob of white vigilantes, nine miles away from the old tabby building. lieu of reminders of hate.

As a little Black girl coming of age in Brunswick In Montgomery, Alabama, one can experience in the 1990s and 2000s, I would’ve never the fruits of such visioning labor at the dreamed that a modern-day lynching in my Memorial for Peace and Justice, colloquially hometown would catalyze uprisings across referred to as the “lynching memorial,” which the globe, but that’s precisely what the killing opened in 2018. Having a lynching memorial in of Arbery manifested. Growing up, teachers the U.S. is painful yet necessary, since there’s no The 800 suspended steel monuments at EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, ignored the Confederate flag-emblazoned end in sight to this horrific act. The memorial Alabama list the names of the more than 4,000 documented Black victims of lynching in the United t-shirts worn by some of my classmates. A covers six acres on top of a hill and overlooks a States between 1877 and 1950. Image courtesy of Human Pictures/Wikimedia Commons. store in our local mall called Dixie Outfitters downtown boasting a statue of Jefferson Davis, proudly displayed its Confederate apparel. the sole president of the Confederacy. It’s a As you head towards the memorial, a giant upright, each one representing a county where project of the human rights nonprofit, Equal open-sided pavilion, you encounter a scene a racial terror lynching occurred, engraved Racist symbols in Brunswick are just beginning Justice Initiative (EJI)—an accompaniment to of bronze figures sculpted by Ghanaian artist, with the names of victims. The words of to be seriously challenged. As recently as their cultural institution less than a mile away, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. The sculpture depicts Montgomery’s own, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 2018, the Brunswick News covered the annual the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass a group of shackled Black people whose along with a quote from Toni Morrison’s novel, Confederate Memorial Day celebration at a Incarceration, housed in a warehouse where bodies are contorted in distress. A baby cries Beloved, and Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, 20-foot tall white stone monument in the city’s slave traders once imprisoned Africans before at their mother’s breast. On the far side of the “Invocation,” are featured throughout. historic downtown, installed by mourning selling them at auctions. pavilion is another sobering piece, this one daughters of the Confederacy in 1902. Four by American conceptual artist, Hank Willis “Your names were never lost, each months after Arbery’s death, the monument At the memorial, visitors interact with text and Thomas. The bronze sculpture evokes the too was spray painted in two different spots with narratives intended to convey the horrors of familiar sight of Black people with their hands name a holy word,” the first line of the acronym “BLM.” the state-sanctioned violence that has plagued stretched to the sky in surrender. Entitled Raise Black people in the U.S. for hundreds of years. Up, the piece embodies the popular rallying Alexander’s poem reads. BLM. Black Lives Matter. These messages Sculpture, art, and design are incorporated cry, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” have irrevocably shifted society and culture into the memorial to “contextualize racial This memorial is hallowed ground that by igniting worldwide movements to attain terror.” EJI founder and Executive Director, Once inside the pavilion, you witness a visual ensures Black lynching victims’ names won’t liberation for Black people after centuries of Bryan Stevenson, conceived of the design ode to the more than 4,000 Black victims of be lost, but rather preserved, remembered, suffering from police and state violence. The with his team of attorneys and a host of lynching in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. and honored. In a field to the side of the omnipresence of BLM is so great that even the collaborating artists. 800 corten steel monuments are suspended pavilion lies 800 monuments identical to the most conservative of cities (i.e., Brunswick) from the ceiling of the pavilion and standing ones inside the memorial, inviting visitors to

34 NAMES NOT LOST NAMES NOT LOST 35 publicly remember these injustices in their own As someone who’s been organizing in the “The Black people didn’t really want to talk Athens County, Ohio has a vastly different communities. Individual counties can claim South for almost a decade, I’ve admired about lynching, and the white people didn’t racial landscape from DeKalb County, Georgia. a replica of these monuments by engaging in EJI’s work for some time. I spoke with really want to talk about it, and then when According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the latter EJI’s Community Remembrance Project. representatives from some of these coalitions, you do, there could be this anger about the is 54.8 percent Black, while the former is 2.8 and their emotions were palpable. During whole thing, so how do we get past all of this? percent Black. Both Black spaces and Black The Community Remembrance Project these conversations, I couldn’t help but We know our history. Let’s know our history, history in Athens, Ohio have been neglected partners with countywide community coalitions think of my hometown, where remembering understand our history, and do better from over the years, but there are concerted efforts committed to steeping themselves in work that in public for Arbery is well underway, but what we know,” Hardy remarked. to recover and preserve them. creates “greater awareness and understanding lynchings of the past have long been forgotten. about racial terror lynchings” and begins “a Since its inception, the coalition has grown The community has discovered Black history necessary conversation that advances truth “We started to turn it from a project to to more than 50 community members in its very soil. On September 14, 2019, more and reconciliation.” Communities find out and organizations. Not even the COVID-19 than 300 people gathered to collect soil near about the project via EJI’s museum, memorial, a journey.” pandemic has stopped it from reaching the site where a 24-year-old Black farm laborer and website or through word of mouth. EJI milestones. In May, with research support and named Christopher Davis was lynched in puts those who express interest in creating – Teresa Hardy, NAACP DeKalb Remembrance sponsorship from EJI, the coalition installed 1881 for allegedly assaulting a white female a coalition and who are from the same Project Coalition their first historical marker outside of DeKalb acquaintance. Speakers from the community communities in touch with one another. Once City Hall, sadly without the fanfare they’d and EJI shared remarks, and an Ohio University a coalition is formed, EJI and the coalition A journey was born from a NAACP DeKalb originally planned due to the pandemic (they (OU) Master’s student in acting, Kezia work in tandem to tell the true story of racial County Branch trip in summer 2018, when they hope to have a dedication ceremony before Waters, channeled Davis’ narrative in a brief terror lynchings in the given county through traveled 160 miles southwest from DeKalb September). Like the rest of EJI’s markers, monologue, with a noose around his neck. the Community Historical Marker Project, the County, Georgia to the EJI memorial and Legacy their marker is an “Alamo”-shaped plaque Community Soil Collection Project, and broader Museum. During the ride home, the group affixed on a pole that bears the history of the “For months [I] feared trouble was coming on community education and engagement. All of decided to unveil their community’s history documented racial terror lynchings in their me,” Davis wrote to his wife while awaiting trial the coalitions are moving towards claiming their of racial terror lynchings with the Community county. Two more are planned for the cities of for his alleged wrongdoing. As a Black person county’s corten steel monument to racial terror Remembrance Project. On September 18, 2019, Lithonia and Redan in DeKalb County. doing well for himself, Davis was a natural lynchings and erecting it in their communities. inside the DeKalb History Center in downtown target for racial violence, so his ominous Decatur, Georgia, with a 30-foot Confederate Only a month after the marker installation, the words are unsurprising. The local newspaper monument outside, the NAACP DeKalb group saw their labors bear more fruit. They’d reported that its own editor was a part of the Remembrance Project Coalition orchestrated been part of a years-long movement to take mob who broke into Davis’ jail cell, put a noose their Interfaith Reconciliation Service. down the Confederate memorial in downtown on him, dragged him to the South Bridge over Decatur, which the city finally did by court the Hocking River, and hung him. While the About 200 community members gathered at order on the night of June 18th, to thunderous bridge is long gone, the base of it has been the ceremony, where coalition chairperson, D.E. applause. The significance of the monument’s recovered and is now owned by OU. Smith, shared the stories of the three known removal on the eve of Juneteenth, a holiday lynchings in DeKalb County to an aghast crowd. honoring the last enslaved Black people Susan Righi, coordinator of the Christopher In attendance were five relatives of Porter in the U.S. to learn of the Emancipation Davis Community Remembrance Project, gets Turner, a Black taxi driver murdered by the Ku Proclamation, wasn’t lost on the coalition. chills when reading the story of Davis’ lynching. Klux Klan in 1945. At the end of the service, a She choked up while recalling it for me. Righi “call to commitment” was issued to attendees “I’ve found it a real blessing to have the helped assemble the project, a coalition to engage in the coalition’s work, mainly their of people and organizations committed to “Journey of Remembrance and Reconciliation.” opportunity to work with some of the justice for Black lives in Athens, including Ada Woodson Adams, a genealogist who’s been NAACP DeKalb President, Teresa Hardy, people I’ve worked with.” a keeper of Black history in the region for told me the Interfaith Reconciliation Service decades, and the Mount Zion Baptist Church Community Remembrance Project Chair, Dee Smith – Susan Righi, Christopher Davis Community (left), and NAACP DeKalb President, Teresa Hardy marked the beginning of a series of forums and Preservation Society, a group dedicated to (right), with a recently installed lynching marker. discussions on racial healing. Remembrance Project rehabilitating a historic Black church. Photo by Albert Fields.

36 NAMES NOT LOST NAMES NOT LOST 37 Righi told me the project has been a good has swelled to 83 members from various ethnic opportunity for white and Black people to and faith backgrounds since early 2019. Prior band together for racial justice. to the pandemic, the group met twice a month at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in St. “With the recent events and more police Petersburg, one of the oldest historically Black killings coming to light, I think this has helped churches in the state. I spoke with a member people understand that this racial violence of their congregation, Jacqueline Hubbard, a we’re seeing perpetrated against Black people retired attorney who serves as a co-chair of the is not the result of bad apples. It’s not some coalition. Hubbard was disturbed by what she kind of new phenomenon, it’s just part of a saw working within the criminal legal system. long continuum,” Righi said. In 2018, she and other members of her local chapter of the Association for the Study of Soil collected at the September ceremony was African American Life and History traveled to sent to be displayed at the EJI museum and Montgomery to experience EJI’s museum and memorial. In June, the project collaborated memorial, which inspired them to answer the with EJI to install a historical marker with organization’s call to participate in “restorative the account of Davis’ lynching near where truth-telling.” it occurred that will make it impossible for Black history in Athens to be buried again. A Bearing witness to the legacy of racial

dedication ceremony for the marker is planned terror epitomized by lynchings in America Davis Community EJI, the Christopher With support from with ceremony a soil collection organizes Project Remembrance laborer Davis, a Black farm memorialize to members community of the group. courtesy lynched in 1881. Photo for later this year. is the coalition’s mission. Their goals include advocating for the truth of a story; I couldn’t write about a lynching memorial on its future. The committee represents a “People need to know that these things educating with the truth of the story; and project without recalling victims of racial terror broad range of perspectives, including a life commemorating and collating the history of lynchings in my own hometown. Their lives member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, happened. They should not be ignored.” racial terror lynchings in Pinellas County in an still matter, and we must remember them if we a member of a local women’s advocacy group, effort to bring about reconciliation, justice, claim to be invested in racial justice. a local history professor, and the pastor of a – Jacqueline Hubbard, Esq., Pinellas County equity, peace, and healing. Black Baptist Church. Community Remembrance Project Coalition Ahmaud Arbery, a fellow graduate of Brunswick Hubbard thinks this work is crucial because the High School, who was cornered by three white I suspect the newly formed committee will general public lacks knowledge and awareness men in a subdivision, then shot to death by the weigh options similar to ones being considered The Pinellas County Community Remembrance of what African Americans have suffered, one with whom I shared a class in ninth grade. across the country. Perhaps the monument Project Coalition is planning their own from slavery times to the current era of mass will end up being displayed in a museum. historical marker dedication ceremony for incarceration. Henry Jackson and Wesley Lewis, who were Maybe it will end up in storage indefinitely. It’s this November to coincide with the 106th given time to pray before having ropes tied possible that it will remain right where it is in anniversary of the lynching of John Evans, a “People would come to see lynchings as if it around their necks and being shot dead by a the heart of downtown. As the process unfolds, Black man accused of murdering a prominent were a barbecue or a picnic, and they would mob of 300 men in February 1891. I’m praying this symbol of hate is replaced local resident and assaulting the man’s wife watch a Black person being literally tortured by one that remembers victims of racial in St. Petersburg, Florida. In front of a crowd to death in crowds of people, mostly white, The eight Black men shot and killed in July violence in the same vein as the Community of at least 1,500, Evans was hung from a light who watched these horrific acts of violence,” 1947 at the now closed Anguilla prison camp Remembrance Project. post, where he clung for dear life before being Hubbard explained. after refusing to wade into a snake-infested riddled by bullets. The marker will be installed swamp without their boots on. at the site of his lynching at Dr. Martin Luther Though the coalition’s marker isn’t up yet, Neesha Powell-Twagirumukiza is a Georgia- King, Jr. Boulevard (formerly 9th Street South) Hubbard said their message is already The Confederate memorial in Brunswick was born and raised movement journalist, creative and Second Avenue South. reverberating around the county. People from spray painted around the same time as multiple nonfiction student, cat parent, spouse, and auntie all walks of life are finally talking about the protests and widespread calls for its removal in living in Atlanta (occupied Cherokee & Creek The coalition formed to commemorate this community’s history of lynching Black people, Arbery’s name, spurring the city commission to territories). racial terror lynching, in addition to two others, a solid step towards racial reconciliation. appoint a nine-member committee to decide

38 NAMES NOT LOST NAMES NOT LOST 39 Whose Monuments: Scenes of Tearing Down, Building Up, and Thinking Through

Daniel Tucker

40 41 BY NOVEMBER, the statue was shrouded. already growing nationwide discussion about Brittany “Bree” Newsome Banners hung from businesses encouraging the politics informing public memorials, removes the Confederate flag peaceful exchange and disparaging hate speech plaques, sculptures, honorary street names, from a pole at the State House in with hopes that tourists would feel comfortable and dedication markers of all kinds. Columbia, South Carolina. Photo by Adam Anderson/REUTERS. downtown once again. A temporary marker celebrated that C’Ville is a place for love not Before May 25, 2020, you may have asked, hate. Despite all the best efforts of the local with all the challenges facing the United tourist office, the large black tarp remained the States today, why are these monuments and focus of public and private speculation. related symbols being widely and publicly discussed now? Of course there were many A few months prior in August 2017, possible reasons: Is it because of President Charlottesville had been the focus of Trump or the Black Lives Matter movement? international attention when a “Unite The Is it their respective uses of social media? Is it Right” rally descended on the small Virginia because of a sharp rise in racist, homophobic, city. Just as thunder follows lightning, so and anti-semitic attacks or the rise of right- too do the anti-racists follow on the heels of wing populism globally? Is it that this time the right-wing racists. The “alt-right,” as the has come and gone, and returned again more white supremacists had become rebranded in deeply connected with both the material and the lead-up to the election of Donald Trump, symbolic legacies of America’s foundational marched towards Emancipation Park—where ideology of white supremacy? city council had voted six months earlier to remove the now-shrouded statue of the But after May 25, 2020, when a police officer commander of the Confederate States Army, kneeled on the neck and killed George Floyd Robert E. Lee, and rename the park bearing his in Minneapolis, the link between all of these name. factors have been made through action. The global movement to confront police brutality On the second day, the violence escalated as and white supremacy, while also celebrating a white supremacist rammed his car into a Black life and joy, has erupted. In the sections counter-demonstration. Paralegal and civil below, scenes and moments from recent years rights activist Heather Heyer was killed and of activism and experimental monument nineteen others seriously injured prompting making will be reviewed to better understand President Trump to state that there were “very the struggle over how history is documented fine people” on both sides of the protest, and how it is connected to movements of today. which was taken to be a clear appeal to his base. After much handwringing, even the known racist Attorney General Jeff Sessions South Pole described the attack as “domestic terrorism” against anti-racist protesters, spawning a civil “In the name of Jesus, this flag has to come rights investigation. The tarp enshrouding the down!” shouted a woman wearing all black statue was removed by court order in February with climbing gear and a helmet as she 2018 and by June the car driver was charged unhooked a waving Confederate flag. Below with multiple hate crimes. These events made her was a man wearing a construction vest, the well-documented increase of such crimes clearly there to support her climb but also much more visible, and helped congeal an to deflect attention with the legitimacy only Previous: Hank Willis Thomas, All Power to All People, a bright yellow vest can convey. Five days Monument Lab, Philadelphia, 2017. Photo courtesy of earlier, the two of them had gathered in a living Steve Weinik/Mural Arts Philadelphia. room with a small group of other activists of

42 WHOSE MONUMENTS 43 different race, gender, and sexual identity, monuments celebrating Confederate history honoring Confederate icons. The SPLC goes on group was initiated by lawyers who, having with many having never met before. They said have been removed, while others have to reveal that contrary to popular belief that worked on the case, realized that much of the they wanted to take collective action to attack been graffitied with the words “Black Lives the monuments are somehow legacies of the energy around these abuses had been sucked a racist symbol—and that they did. One of Matter.” As historian Sarah Beetham wrote the U.S. Civil War itself, it was not until 1910 that up by court room processes and worried that the earliest actions in the period of increased following year: “The recent spate of vandalism there were the largest number of monuments people might forget. They reached out to monument removals, this 2015 action by directed at Confederate monuments in the erected—forty five years after the end of the victims who wanted justice and to artists in artist Brittany “Bree” Newsome captured the wake of racially motivated violence against Civil War and concurrent with the enactment their community who had experience with national imagination as she climbed the South Black Americans reveals the unavoidable of the so-called “Jim Crow” laws that enforced symbolic representations of history. Carolina State Capitol’s flag pole on June 27th connection with racial oppression that has segregation and disenfranchisement of African to remove the Confederate flag flying above. always been a part of Confederate memory.” Americans until they were repealed in 1965. In CTJM issued an open call for “speculative an updated edition of the 2016 report “Whose proposals” to memorialize the Chicago In a statement posted online, Newsome wrote Author Rebecca Solnit reflected on what she Heritage?”, the SPLC identifies 114 Confederate Police torture cases. Workshops on design of the racially motivated massacre in the calls the “Monument Wars”: “After any true symbols that have been removed since the strategies for representing complicated Charleston, South Carolina church, just 10 days conquest, a city’s landscape changes to reflect Charleston attack—and 1,747 that still stand. histories were held at local history museums prior, which left nine people dead. The murderer the values of the victors. In New Orleans, in the and art centers. Inspiration was drawn from had celebrated the Confederate flag, which had places where these monuments still stand, so With the number of these symbols standing on global sources including European Holocaust originally been re-raised at the state’s capitol in does the Confederacy.” That same year, after public land maintained by tax dollars—some memorials, apartheid monuments in South 1961, a clear statement opposing the famous much legal jostling, the statue of Robert E. Lee estimates reaching $40 million over the last Africa, and creative activism around the lunch counter sit-ins occurring at the time in New Orleans had been removed from Lee decade—the stakes of this perpetuation have a history of military-sponsored disappearances during the civil rights movement. Connecting to Circle. material as well as psychic toll. in Argentina. Resulting exhibitions took place that history, Newsome wrote that: “I began my at the Sullivan Galleries of the School of the activism by participating in the Moral Monday The controversy around monuments is not Art Institute of Chicago and a community movement, fighting to restore voting rights in just centered on their removal, but also their Monument to Torture gallery, Art In These Times, in 2012 and 2013. North Carolina after the Supreme Court struck creation. In the report “Whose Heritage: Public The emphasis on “speculation” was essential down key protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Symbols of the Confederacy”, the Southern The histories that monuments represent as the group did not aspire to build bronze Act.” She continued, outlining connections Poverty Law Center (SPLC) created a near need not be distant, as there are many recent statues but, rather, sought to emphasize between South Carolina, global conflicts and comprehensive survey of Confederate flags, memories of urban life today that remain process over product. The proposal process ethnic genocide, and the killing of unarmed building names, and public monuments. painfully present. led to explorations of the poetic and the Black men by police in Ferguson, Missouri and There, SPLC explains “this study, while far from impossible, of the challenge to adequately Baltimore just months before. comprehensive, identified a total of 1,503… After decades of campaigns led by victims capture such a complex event, and of [including] 718 monuments and statues” of police abuse, their families, lawyers, innovative possible approaches that could Since Newsome’s action, calls to remove primarily in southern United States as well and social justice activists, in 2008, former have a greater impact. flags have extended to monuments. In cities as whole counties and cities, public schools, Chicago Police commander, Jon Burge, was throughout the southern United States, military bases, and tons of historical markers finally indicted. It was charged that Burge Through the group’s artistic process—and had overseen and perpetrated the torture through the decades of what organizer of over 100 mostly African American men at Mariame Kaba has called the grassroots slow Chicago police headquarters from 1972 to 1991. and “sustained resistance” of the 1990s by With the number of these symbols standing on Despite this being proven, Burge was indicted activists, victims, and lawyers—on Wednesday, on the basis that he had sought to “corruptly May 6, 2015, the Chicago City Council passed public land maintained by tax dollars—some obstruct, influence, and impede an official the reparations package for the Burge torture proceeding” with false statements due to the survivors and their family members. The estimates reaching $40 million over the last statute of limitations limiting prosecution for package included funding for a curriculum to torture. By January 2011, federal court served be taught in public schools about the history decade—the stakes of this perpetuation have Burge’s sentence and by that June, a group of the events, support for a memorial, a calling themselves the Chicago Torture Justice counseling center for victims and their families, a material as well as psychic toll. Memorials (CTJM) held their first publicmeeting and a financial reparations fund. In 2018, CTJM to talk about public memory of the events. The selected eight Chicago-based artists to create

44 WHOSE MONUMENTS WHOSE MONUMENTS 45 Appropriate Monuments Rizzo, the statue All Power to All People by Philadelphia-born Hank Willis Thomas—while Philadelphia is another city grappling with the not initially designed for that site—could not bronzed legacy of a state-sanctioned abuser. have found a more appropriate home. In fact, In the summer of 2017, a campaign erupted it was the question of appropriateness that to call for the removal of a larger-than-life motivated its placement. Part of a city-wide statue of Frank Rizzo. Rizzo served the city festival of new and temporary monuments, as a policeman, Police Commissioner, and Monument Lab, 20 artist projects took over two-term mayor in the 1970s. While being Philadelphia premised on the question, “What well-liked by certain segments of the city’s is an appropriate monument for the city of white population, he was known to advocate Philadelphia today?” abuse and surveillance in communities of color and of social justice activists in his time. The artist-designed “prototype monuments” To this day, the city is still greatly burdened created for Monument Lab varied in overall by the payments to police pension funds, approach through media, scale, subject which dramatically increased during his matter, and their relationship to site. Thomas’ tenure, indicative of his method of choice for pick was in a busy downtown plaza just a Rendering of the selected proposal for the Chicago the Chicago for proposal of the selected Rendering Memorial, designed by artist Patricia Justice Torture Photo designer John Lee. Nguyen and architectural of CTJM. courtesy solidifying loyalty. block away from City Hall where Mel Chin erected a series of wheelchair accessible proposals for a permanent memorial and two exposed public space into the courtyard of the Over the course of 2017, activists would hold ramps leading to two identical pedestals, each have been selected to proceed to a completed city’s police headquarters.1, 2 protests at the statue and—similar to actions reading simply, “Me” where a dedication might realization. on civil war monuments—it was painted with typically name a historical figure. In that same After the police statue was removed, a rough the words “Black Power” and covered in red site, Michelle Angela Ortiz created a video- This was not the first time that Chicago had outline of a circle remained in the cement paint as was a mural depicting Rizzo in South projected mural Seguimos Caminando (We struggled with memorializing police violence where the pedestal had been. In 2002, the Philadelphia. Police started to hold their Keep Walking) which grew out of her ongoing against city residents. Following the infamous artist Michael Piazza had the idea for a festival own gatherings at the statue and it became work with immigrant families detained at the “Haymarket Riot” of 1886, in which both of art projects that would inhabit the circle a flashpoint for debate drawing comparisons nearby Berks County detention facility. Blocks police and workers protesting for an eight for eight hour shifts intended to memorialize to Confederate monuments in the South. away in Washington Square Park, two artists hour workday were killed, the city erected a the workers’ demands for an eight hour work Commissioned by the Frank L. Rizzo Memorial took radically different approaches to material. monument that acknowledged only the loss day. Piazza’s “Haymarket 8 Hour Action Series” Committee and paid for by his supporters, the Artist Kaitlin Pomerantz replaced park benches of police life. The police held Veterans of the included soapbox speeches by historians statue was installed in 1998—less than 7 years with iconic Philly “stoops” or stairs recovered Haymarket Riot parades until at least the and artists, the installation of a fake street after Rizzo died. While it is common for more from front of houses being demolished across 1960s and the history of the workers was never parking sign right on the site that read “No time to pass between a well-known figure’s the city. In the same site, Marisa Williamson officially recognized despite inspiring millions Working: Unlimited Idling 9am-5pm,” a history passing and their public memorialization, the developed a neighborhood walking tour using worldwide to mark the event with May Day bike tour, a sewing bee, a puppet show, and a Rizzo statue led many to understand more augmented reality technology that could be celebrations. The city’s police statue inspired performance using contemporary street-team about how monuments are installed in the first downloaded to a smart-phone and allow the resentment ranging from vandalism to being tactics to connect history to the present called place and there has been growing consensus viewer to follow a fictional character through run over by a disgruntled street-car driver “Hay! Market Research Group.” This impulse that this process was too quickly on the heels a “video scavenger hunt” about the search for who aimed his trolley at the larger than life to be generative versus tearing down could of the former Mayor’s death. Thousands signed Black freedom in Philadelphia’s past, present, policeman. In the 1960s and 70s, the Weather be read as both an occupation that insists on petitions on either side for maintaining it and future. Underground targeted the statue twice with a visibility, or that could bring about healing. versus moving it. bombing and eventually it was moved from the In Philadelphia, a place where historic homes, One day, seemingly out of the blue, a twelve reenactments, and walking tours prominently foot tall afro-pick topped with an iconic Black dot the landscape, the prototype monuments 1. Sarah Kanouse, “Performing Haymarket,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Power fist appeared stuck teeth-first into of Monument Lab served to complicate a city Geographies 7, no. 1 (2008): 69-87. the cement only feets away from the Rizzo which is economically and culturally organized 2. Nicolas Lampert, “Haymarket: An Embattled History of Static Monuments and Public Interventions,” in A People’s Art History of the United States (The New Press, 2013), 71-85. monument. Appearing to taunt the bronze around nostalgia.

46 WHOSE MONUMENTS WHOSE MONUMENTS 47 Belonging full participation and self-actualization free of the harassment and oppression that typically accompany economic marginalization. Monuments are contested The heightened public visibility of police killings and the urgent social movement As the national Right to the City Alliance today because of unfinished response has catapulted the concept of the wrote in their 2015 article, “We Can’t Win a war on Black people to a broad new audience. Right To The City Unless #BlackLivesMatter,” The public responses to the killings of twenty- “Working to win a right to the city for all puts business from the past, two-year-old Oscar Grant by Oakland public us in direct opposition with the process of transit police in 2009, and seventeen year urban restructuring (popularly known as old Trayvon Martin by a Florida civilian in gentrification) that the free market enforces 2012, quickly moved from local to national. on our communities. It’s a process that is While fighting against police brutality was a heavily reliant on the policing of working consistent commitment of Civil Rights and class, black and brown communities to Black Power organizers for decades, the more impose destabilization and displacement. recent activism of groups like Copwatch Police violence—and the threat of it—is an and the National Police Accountability intimate part of our daily lives.” The authors Project in the 1990s built an infrastructure go on to state that, “We know that to build a for today’s movements. Instances of police society in which Black lives truly do matter, murder of unarmed civilians like Mike communities need democratic control Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 led to a over the resources needed to produce safe, further widening of the awareness that equitable, nourishing, livelihoods. This is an many communities have had for too long— inextricable part of our collective cry for a that police, far from being protectors, are right to the city.” themselves primary threats. From there, #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName Monuments are contested today because of became global movements powered by unfinished business from the past, but also social media and first inhabited and then significant demographic shifts in the present. defined a space alongside #OccupyWallStreet, In Charlottesville, the alt-right protesters #Kony2012, #IdleNoMore, #BringBackOurGirls, chanted “You Will Not Replace Us” and “White #OscarsSoWhite, #NoDAPL, #MeToo and Lives Matter.” They also shouted the common #IfIDieInASchoolShooting. leftist call-and-response “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” For that night, in the eyes of the world One outcome from the explosion of protests watching on newscasts, the racists did seem to initiated by these movements is to highlight command at least some control of the streets. the ongoing struggle and the absolute urgency for Black residents of the city to But, this was the same place where the city feel belonging.3 Such a feeling is not merely council had originally voted to remove the psychic, but also governed by laws and Robert E. Lee statue and rename his namesake permitted by a social fabric that can be park. So whose city is it? The city was mobilized to ensure safety or encourage fear. undeniably changing. And so was the country. transformed monument in Richmond, Virginia E. Lee Gen. Robert The Confederate public down take to calls and messages anti-racist with graffitied protestors by Mobilus in Mobili/Flickr.com. by symbols. Image displays of Confederate The “right to the city” is often evoked around but also significant affordable housing and other economic […] justice issues, but it also means the right to demographic shifts in the present. 3. bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (Routledge, 2008), 3-5.

48 WHOSE MONUMENTS WHOSE MONUMENTS 49 People who identify as white have, since economic development arguments that insist The Memorial to Enslaved 2000, become a minority of the population that the repackaging of the past is actually Laborers at the University of in the majority of urban counties while their the only way to draw in tourist dollars. This Virginia acknowledges and “majority” status has been maintained in rural position is complicated by companies like honors the more than 4,000 areas and suburbs. As this shift occurs, the Freedom Lifted that have developed Civil enslaved African Americans inheritors of racial privilege are still found in the Rights-centric tourism in place of Civil War- who built and maintained halls of power throughout cities in the United centric tourism while focusing on building the University. Designed in a States, but their hegemony is being actively southern “tourism that boosts local economies collaboration between Höweler contested in current social movements, local by working with community-based and black- + Yoon Architecture, Dr. Mabel O. elections, and in the public character of cities. owned businesses whenever possible.”4 Wilson (Studio&), Gregg Bleam Beyond high-profile fights with racists, the fight Landscape Architect, and Dr. over the future of cities is now confronting the In New Orleans, the group Paper Monuments Frank Dukes. Photo by Sanjay white anxieties that continue to result in a deep has taken this same context of a southern Suchak/UVA. and uneven economic disinvestment from region that has too long been overdetermined housing access to public schools. by narratives of racist history and launched a project seeking to offer a corrective. They When considered in relationship to want to share “the stories that are too often These parallel strands of counter-monument The examples from Chicago, New Orleans, monuments, these demographic shifts lost or obscured when New Orleans history campaigns have now fully converged, dealing and Philadelphia above could be read as a mean that a city or a region may have sorted is recounted. These are the stories of New with the conquest of the Americas and the Civil counterpoint to the campaigns to remove bastions of supporters of a racist monument Orleanians who were poor and working- War at one end of the timeline, and more recent Confederate monuments in Charlottesville and living in a city that is overwhelmingly ready to class. Black and brown. Women and children. memories of police violence on the other. flags in South Carolina. They could suggest confront and move on from its racist past. In Lesbian, gay, trans, and queer. Immigrants that there is a tension between removing and Philadelphia after weeks of protests in June and refugees. Those who fought battles for Today in Charlottesville, the Robert E. Lee proposing what bold new ideas and histories 2020, the statue of Frank Rizzo was removed, inclusion and justice; those who worked statue remains in limbo and there is a new should be bronzed and mounted on a pedestal. and in July, a vote held on removing a South to improve lives and bring hope, but who monumental experience to contend with. The They could also offer a key to the process that Philadelphia monument to Christopher were and are unlikely to be elevated on any Memorial to Enslaved Laborers was installed must be embarked on in today’s cities to not Columbus also overwhelmingly passed. In pedestal.” Inspired by the work of Monument this year to commemorate the 4,000 enslaved only think about what could be removed, but each site the willful and prideful inheritors Lab in Philadelphia, they launched a series people who lived and worked and created what processes could be engaged in order to of racist and protectionist political culture of temporary monuments premised on the the literal foundations of the University of gather support and collectivize vision for what attempted to defend the statues until public question, “What is an appropriate monument Virginia (UVA). The space was designed by a could be built or if this approach to permanent pressure became overwhelming. for New Orleans today?” diverse team that included the consultation statues is acceptable any longer. And, in of descendants of the enslaved laborers, UVA that process, it may be revealed that there is […] In the summer of 2020, as the seeds of anti- students, and the Charlottesville community. nothing more important than the process itself. racist protests against police brutality deepen It is an inviting space that inspires gathering, Temporarily Under and spread, there are further calls to remove but it is haunting with a minimal design Confederate statues and other memorials organized around concentric circles including a Daniel Tucker works as an artist, writer, educator, Construction upholding myths and legacies of white timeline about slavery, the names of enslaved and organizer developing documentaries, supremacy. Cities ranging from Richmond, people presented along with gashes on the publications, classes, exhibitions, and events Today, in many cities in the Southern Virginia; Jacksonville, Florida; and Indianapolis inside, and on the outside, the eyes of Isabella inspired by his interest in social movements and United States, the debate over Confederate removed statues in the middle of the night—a Gibbons, a woman who was enslaved at the people and places from which they emerge. monuments is drawn as a debate between hasty culmination of work that has taken place UVA, are engraved by artist Eto Otitigbe. The The author would like to thank Alex Young for his history as a resource versus history as over the recent years. project would not have come about without editorial feedback on this essay. a burden. This can often be inflected by the activism of students, part of a movement to pursue acknowledgement and reparations Additional reading resources are compiled in this at universities across the country. The time is online document: https://bit.ly/3aoyVQP 4. In the context of the pandemic, Freedom Lifted has pivoted towards online trainings around now to move it from the campus to the capitol. anti-racism and policing.

50 WHOSE MONUMENTS WHOSE MONUMENTS 51 Reclaiming Pepe

Documenting How a Hate Symbol Gets Made and Unmade

Arthur Jones & Michael Premo Illustration by Matt Furie, courtesy of Arthur Jones. in Conversation

52 53 Pepe The Frog entered mainstream society on the tidal wave MICHAEL PREMO: Congratulations on the film. I was seventeen years old and watching this, of white cultural backlash that President Trump rode in on, a I’m curious, before you even thought about what would I think about it at this moment?” seemingly out-of-nowhere icon: a cartoon frog that inexplicably doing this film, what kind of work were you doing? How did it lead you to making a film on I also felt like it was important to really address embodied fascistic tendencies and an “America First” ethos, this topic? the cynicism of what’s going on right now. A communicated solely through his bulging, squinty eyes and lot of films about social media don’t really noncommittal sneer. At that point, Pepe was a long way from ARTHUR JONES: This is my first film, and engage the subject matter in an emotional his Boys Club home, a humorous and popular series created by I never really thought about myself as a way. This film really allows you to talk about underground comic artist Matt Furie in 2006, and only halfway on documentary filmmaker before. I never the way emotion spreads in groups online, really wanted to make work that was socially how it can kind of metastasize, and how it can his journey that would span the entire world and political spectrum. conscious, honestly. Mostly, I would make be coalition-building. I think most people’s In 2017, artist and art director Arthur Jones began directing his first money doing advertising, doing marketing, politics are based on sort of a personal film,Feels Good Man, documenting Furie’s efforts to challenge the that kind of stuff, as a freelancer. But [this] emotionality. I also thought it was a unique gambit of white supremacists, self-marginalized male youth, and subject matter was something that I became chance to make a film that people on both MAGA enforcers who populated the 4Chan communities where really obsessed with. I was friends with Matt sides of the cultural divide would view and Furie, who’s the subject of Feels Good Man, have different thoughts about. Pepe became radicalized; claiming for themselves the artist’s sweet, through the indie comics world. selfish, stoned frog. MICHAEL: I’m curious if you could say more Then I started to see Pepe the Frog pop up about what your upbringing means and how Over the 2020 summer, with now incumbent President Trump online. In 2015, there was this two-week period that might have also influenced how you only intensifying what has been his four-year run for reelection on where Pepe the Frog was supposedly used structured and approached making the film. a white supremacist platform, journalist and filmmaker Michael by a school shooter in Oregon on October 1, Premo interviewed Jones by video call to discuss the serious socio- and then two weeks later then presidential ARTHUR: The things in 4chan that I recognized candidate Donald Trump retweeted an image in myself as a teenager was this sense of self- political implications of the rightwing media tactics that have of Pepe as himself. And I was like, “What do righteousness. I really had this sense that been naively dismissed as “trolling,” and the ethical and aesthetic they have to do with my friend’s comic?” That the whole world was against me, and I feel implications of documenting the culture on film right now.Feels was the inciting incident for me as an artist. Good Man will be featured in the season premiere of Independent Lens on PBS, October 19th, and can be rented on all major MICHAEL: So, what was in the air and the streaming platforms. context of you growing up? Were you pre-social media? Seeing these memes, was that sort of new for you? Or was this something that you had grown up with?

ARTHUR: This story really appealed to all the things that I was personally obsessed with: underground and independent comics, but also conservatism in America. I was raised in an evangelical family in rural Missouri. I definitely recognize a lot of the reactionary politics of the right from stuff that came from my upbringing. If 4chan had been around when I was in high school, I might have been a kid on it. I know what it’s like to sort of come out of the fog of right-wing media and basically A meme of Donald Trump as Pepe the Frog that was feel as though you have to… almost escape retweeted by then-presidential candidate Trump. a cult. As I was making the film, I thought, “If Image courtesy of Twitter.

54 RECLAIMING PEPE RECLAIMING PEPE 55 that’s the kernel for a lot of people on 4chan. potency of the images you are putting forth. They feel trapped in this echo chamber. It’s People like Richard Spencer know exactly what a platform, but it really becomes a mindset. they are doing in terms of the way they address But 4chan is also a place where people post the media. Those guys spent enough time pretty unvarnished stories, and so they are in the 2015-2016 moment on network TV, in kind of open to you being open with them. major publications. We could very easily take So, I took a journalistic perspective of being a the things that we needed from those sources. little bit more immersive. And that does create problems because sometimes you are being You will notice in the film that you never hear immersive with people whose viewpoints you Trump’s voice, and there’s a lot of pretty toxic, realize are more extreme than you initially racist, fucked up memes in the film, but we thought when you first started talking to them. chose to omit animating those because it We had to figure out what are the guardrails, just had too much stage presence. We really so that these subjects aren’t necessarily wanted the film to take Matt’s initial intention taking control of our narrative, and we weren’t of the character of Pepe the Frog and canonize putting forth this toxicity into the world in an that. There’s a lot of copyrighted characters Artist Matt Furie drawing Pepe in the film Feels irresponsible manner. that are used by racists online. SpongeBob Good Man. Photo by Kurt Keppeler. SquarePants is a really popular racist meme, MICHAEL: That’s exactly what I’m curious but it has a huge corporation that is able to about. What were some of those guardrails? protect that intellectual property. Matt didn’t How did you help deal with that? really have those sorts of resources at his disposal, so we really sought to canonize the ARTHUR: We wanted to find really powerful version of Matt’s character that felt true to Matt voices that push back, to always make it feel and those original comics. like the adults were in the room. So, we got great voices like Adam Serwer who writes for MICHAEL: It’s really great to hear the sort The Atlantic. We got great voices like Aaron of thought process that went into that Sankin, who is someone that I knew from decision, particularly around how to canonize We are dealing with the world of The Center for Investigative the original intent. I’m really curious if the Reporting. We wanted to make sure that film presents an opportunity for folks to a situation where the everything was contextualized. understand the right or the left in any kind of way? MICHAEL: Did you ever try to reach out to Internet is basically any people who are self-identified white ARTHUR: We are dealing with a situation nationalists? where the Internet is basically commodifying our emotions. All of our likes and dislikes commodifying our ARTHUR: In the very beginning of this project, and comments are now being collected and I did think about reaching out to some white aggregated and used to sell us shit. Pepe is emotions. nationalists, and I did have phone calls with part of the same attention economy, but on some guys that were straight-up self-identified places like 4chan it is an attention economy fascists. But I very quickly realized that wasn’t of extremism, where the only way that you going to be responsible or productive. I think are able to gain status in that community is to you saw, post-Charlottesville, a different be edgier, and shitter, and more cynical, and dialogue happening within documentarians darker, and more fucked up than the other and journalists about what is responsible to person, and that ultimately leads to fascistic show and what is not. Filmmaking is a visual thought. And they can pretend like it’s a bunch medium and you really have to be aware of the of jokes, but the reality is that these ideas

56 RECLAIMING PEPE RECLAIMING PEPE 57 trickle up from these rather niche platforms in the film or not? There was this appeal that things that we make are going to become something sort of an innately human about into mainstream discourse. Like it or not, the you can’t give it oxygen, but I think not giving it more important just because more people are what we are experiencing that I have yet to future of our democracy is going to be in the oxygen basically allowed all of these right-wing making stuff all of the time. put a finger on. I certainly appreciate your film comment section of YouTube. I do think one ideas to have potency within culture. We have because it’s provoked that sort of thinking for of the reasons Trump got elected is because to be able to talk about these things, address The Trump surrogate in the film, Matthew me as I was watching it. we all got our grandparents on Facebook, and them head on and be able to call things crazy Brainard, talks about how memes basically they just didn’t know how to understand all or fascistic for what they are. energize a group of supporters because they ARTHUR: Oh, that’s great, man. It’s funny, in the shit being thrown at them. I think as we feel like they are now part of a campaign. the film we interview a guy who’s a magician, move forward culturally, we really have to have The argument about 4chan and the 2016 MAGA became a people’s movement because and people either love or hate that. There’s a more of an incisive understanding of the way in election is that the constituency of people people were making media, and then that certain sort of documentary purist that is like, which we communicate. that were on these message boards didn’t media was getting adopted by the figureheads “Oh, you guys, come on.” But I mean, the film necessarily translate to voters. It’s a young of that movement. I do think art and artmaking is about a cartoon frog that’s stoned. There is MICHAEL: Did you personally learn anything group of people that weren’t considered to is going to shift into being more political as something about it that is impossible, there new or make any discoveries about the be part of the process. But I do think they are more things go online. Because the way that is a randomness to it that is kind of crazy and mechanics of right-wing, or left-wing, basically the people who are controlling the we basically build community is through these unpredictable, and there isn’t precedent for it. politicization in this process? discourse. We really have to understand that memes that we are making, the things that we We need to talk about it in a way that’s going dynamic. are sharing on our phones, the things that we to slightly open people up to thinking about ARTHUR: In one scene in the film, we talk to a consortium of computer scientists who have MICHAEL: To bring it back to this question basically been collecting every single post on of art, there’s a school of thought that would 4chan and every single post on the politics argue that all art is political—even your board of 8chan before it disappeared. Those apolitical stance is a statement of politics. Like it or not, the future of our guys trace how a lot of the ideas that end up Would you say that the dilemma of Matt and in more mainstream sources like Fox News Pepe the Frog makes you for or against that democracy is going to be in the or Donald Trump’s Twitter feed start in these particular statement? online fever swamps. We certainly see that comment section of YouTube. playing out also in the way the primaries have ARTHUR: With a certain sort of intellectual been moving in America. If you read Ratf**ked, imagination, you could say Pepe is an emblem that book about gerrymandering in America, for capitalism. So much of the left versus the you know that gerrymandered districts have a right [discourse] is choosing to ignore the are selling on Instagram, Etsy, and all this sort a larger way of encountering the zeitgeist. bunch of like-minded people; the voices that systems that we all live with and the systems of stuff, in order to make it in the gig economy. The magician is really talking about art and end up winning in those blocks are the most that control us as a society. And certainly, all I think art is becoming commerce faster and willpower combining into cultural moments; flashy and extreme voices. You end up getting art gets made within a context, and therefore faster, and being aggregated for data mining people imbued Pepe with significance, and the most extreme voices coming out of these I think all art comes from a certain time and a purposes. I’m curious to see if there will ever then that significance took on a life of its own primaries, and then those people are ending certain place, and is able to tell us something be a way to take the best parts of social media, within a community of people. up in Congress. [As I was] finding people to about ourselves that we didn’t necessarily remove all of the data mining and privacy talk to when I first started the project, there know before. That was one of the things that invasion, and create a more egalitarian artistic MICHAEL: What I loved about [that interview] was a sense among very lefty academics that certainly fascinated me with this story. community. was its ability to speak to this ancient way this is something that we can’t give too much that ideas move through societies. And I credence to or is something that we can’t talk The dialogue around Matt is also fascinating MICHAEL: Yeah, I do feel like there is some immediately thought of the “Kilroy Was about really. because it’s totally new. It’s easy for people precedent for this. If we look back at how Here” graffiti that emerged in the 1930s and to be critical of Matt but the reality is this has myths and legends and stories traveled World War II—it just popped up all over the MICHAEL: What exactly is something we can’t never happened before—it’s a totally unique through society, they were definitely used place. I came up with graffiti culture and was talk about? situation. It’s something that I think is going by a wide variety of different people to fascinated by that, and that’s just one of many to be looked back at with a lot of interest communicate and express their values. We examples of these things that just sort of ARTHUR: Well, it goes back to the question, and scrutiny. I think as the Internet becomes are seeing the mutation of that in the Internet magically move through our culture, and it’s were we going to talk to white supremacists a more potent force in our lives, art and the age in totally crazy ways, but I think there’s really hard to identify or explain [even though]

58 RECLAIMING PEPE RECLAIMING PEPE 59 “Hong Kongers, Don’t Give Up!” Using Pepe as a symbol of the pro-democracy movement, peaceful protesters in Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon, Hong Kong form a human chain stretching along busy Nathan Road. Photo by Iain Masterton/Alamy Live News. we have been doing it for thousands of years. now?” The baton of Pepe has now been passed As long as humans have had societies, we’ve clear across to the other side of the world and had these ideas that move through society and is being used by a different counter-cultural set the values. movement, this time in an anti-authoritarian way. It’s fascinating all the different twists and ARTHUR: Absolutely. Certainly animals have turns. always been part of that too. Anthropomorphic animals have been around since ancient Egypt. If you are thinking about this in a Joseph Arthur Jones is the director of Feels Good Man, Campbell sort of way, Pepe does sort of figure and has art directed animation and motion into [what] we in society are always looking graphics for journalists and documentary for: we are looking for myth and we are looking filmmakers. for icons to make meaning. Pepe, for whatever reason, became one of those icons. Michael Premo is an artist, photojournalist and documentary producer, and strategist, and the And he still continues to have resonance in co-founder and Executive Producer at Storyline. different cultures in different ways, good and bad. The footage in Hong Kong [came to us at a] moment where we didn’t know how to Opposite: Pro-democracy protesters wear masks end the film and then all of a sudden we’re including those of Pepe the Frog during a march in just like, “Wait. What? What’s going on right Hong Kong. Photo by Kin Cheung, File/AP Photo.

60 RECLAIMING PEPE 61 Mirror Memoirs is a national storytelling and organizing project intervening in rape culture by uplifting the narratives, healing, and Changing the leadership of LGBTQI+ Black and Indigenous people, and other people of color who survived childhood sexual abuse. In early 2016, Amita Swadhin assembled an advisory board of LGBTQI+ survivors Narrative on of color, created research questions, and set out across the United States to interview survivors at this intersection, ultimately recording sixty audio interviews across fifteen states. We asked them to reflect Childhood upon their journey and their plans for the artistic components of the work intended to engage the public. We also asked them to share what these interviews reveal about how traditional reliance on Sexual Abuse state institutions and carceral solutions actually perpetuate harm to survivors, while doing little to address the root causes of rape culture.

Amita Swadhin Illustration by Donovan Vim Crony for Mirror Memoirs

62 63 WHEN I BEGAN my Masters in Public needed a mechanism that would help people Administration program at NYU in 2008, I knew understand the collective, systemic, historical I wanted to return to my earliest professional and cultural nature of this violence. Individual Individual survivors needed to tell our work, focused on ending child sexual abuse survivors needed to tell our stories in a way stories in a way that could still allow us and family violence. So I did what any public that could still allow us to be in control of policy student would do: I started going the narrative, and not have to go through the to be in control of the narrative, and not through the statistics again. The research terrible mainstream media machine that too have to go through the terrible mainstream around the neurobiology of trauma and the often propagates rape culture. long-term health effects of childhood sexual media machine. abuse has really advanced over a decade. While I knew Ping Chong and Company’s theater I was in grad school, the American Academy of program Undesirable Elements dealt with Pediatrics published a study showing gender really difficult subject matter in a way that nonconformity was a risk factor for child sexual was not extractive. A play is developed and abuse. The main data sources for child sexual performed by an ensemble that shares an abuse are from very mainstream places like the experience. It’s not about one person’s story. U.S. Department of Justice and the Bureau of There’s no superhero, there’s no pedestal, Justice Statistics and the Centers for Disease there’s no super victim. I met with assistant Control (CDC). Yet, we don’t see organizing director Sara Zatz, and she agreed to hire me campaigns from billboards, and public to create a show that used the experience of service announcements, and podcasts, and adult survivorship of childhood sexual violence television shows, and paintings, and cultural as the common thread. We co-facilitated three interventions that you would expect with weekends of writing workshops and theater any other pandemic. During this time of the games that led to the creation of the script of coronavirus pandemic, I’ve really come to use Secret Survivors. The show ended up being a the word pandemic to talk about childhood cornerstone of a huge philanthropic initiative rape, because the CDC conservatively by the Novo Foundation to create some of estimates that 20% of Americans are survivors. the first funded programs lifting up survivors The rates are even higher in several other of color who were doing work to end child countries, again based on government studies. sexual abuse. In 2015, I got a phone call from For instance, in my ancestral homeland of someone who was affiliated with the Novo India, the rate of survivorship is 1 in 2 children. Foundation explaining that they were starting What other public health issue can you think a new program specifically for people of color of that affects that many people, yet we don’t who are childhood sexual abuse survivors and have any kind of public messaging around? who are doing work to end child sexual abuse I can’t really think of a single one besides called the Just Beginnings Fellowship. And childhood sexual violence. that’s what led me to create Mirror Memoirs.

I started thinking about why that was. With I was publicly out as a survivor as a college childhood sexual violence, there’s no lack of freshman because I worked at the women’s data. There is actually just a lack of cultural center. Because this is a global pandemic that ease in naming the violence beyond the nobody knows how to talk about, except in media’s long history of sensationalizing maybe secret corners or in private therapy, a lot individual cases. If you only studied media of people on campus started disclosing to me. reporting of child sexual abuse, you might So by the time I was casting Secret Survivors, think it was just a smattering of unconnected I already knew a number of people who were dots, with no structural or historical context at child sexual abuse survivors, all of whom were

all. That’s not the reality, so I realized that we either artists or social justice organizers in New Tim’m West by Mer Young. participant project Memoirs of Mirror collage Photo

64 CHANGING THE NARRATIVE CHANGING THE NARRATIVE 65 York City. And by 2009, all of us had already different agents of the state—not only workers individually developed the politics of prison in psychiatric institutions, but workers in group abolition. That was really important to me in homes, foster care families, police officers, the original show because state violence was and guards in juvenile detention centers. a big part of my own survivorship narrative. Also studies show that specifically male- When there was state intervention in my life assigned-at-birth children who were gender at age 13, the social workers, and prosecutors, nonconforming in any way were the most at and police officers were all white people who risk. They were six times likelier than children either threatened to prosecute my mother of any other gender to experience rape or or responded with very racist white savior sexual assault, so they should be the face of narratives and untrue assumptions about and comprise the bulk of decision-makers in Indian American immigrant communities. an emerging movement to end sexual violence. But that is absolutely not the case, so Mirror The state mandated me to go to group therapy Memoirs aims to center transgender, non- when I was 16 for an entire year with other binary, intersex, and gender nonconforming Illustration of Jaden Fields by artist Jess X. Snow. of Jaden Fields by Illustration teenage girls who were incest survivors. The male-assigned-at-birth people. The project youngest girl there, Pauline, was 13, in foster also centers Black and Indigenous people, care, Indo-Guyanese American, and really because this country was established through struggling with suicidal ideation, because the rape of enslaved Black and Indigenous she had been harmed by so many men by children, as is well documented, in California the time she joined our therapy group. After a Catholic missions, Native boarding schools, few months, she was institutionalized in the and southern plantations. With that goal in county mental health hospital, where she was mind, I put a board together of people I had harmed again by one of the hospital workers, long-standing relationships with, all of whom and she ended up taking her own life. She was fall under the umbrella of LGBTQI+ BIPOC the second child in six months to take their people who survived childhood sexual abuse. own life at that same hospital. So I already also They helped me shape this organization from had a very personal awareness that the state the beginning. They helped define the research sanctioned perpetration against children. I questions. They also helped me structure have since learned that it’s very common for our strategic priorities, once I realized this children of color, queer children and trans was going to be more than an audio archive. children, especially those who are wards of I recently named a co-director, Jaden Fields, the state, to experience sexual assault at the a trans Black man who is a survivor of hands of hospital workers in those facilities. childhood sex trafficking and other forms of And it was really important to me in building childhood sexual violence. We currently have Mirror Memoirs that we highlighted that reality a fundraising campaign to fund his position, if even more deliberately than Secret Survivors people wanted to contribute to that!1 had. Mirror Memoirs has deliberately and unapologetically been an abolitionist project From the initial sixty interviews, I learned from the beginning. a lot about how sacred it is—and also how treacherous it can be—to hold that kind of There is a particularly beautiful kind of art in One of my aims with the project was to space for people, many of whom have never highlight how much the state sanctions had the privilege of therapy before. These allowing for that social fabric to be woven where perpetration and even fuels it by many are many people who are severely under- only isolation and wounding existed before.

1. Support Mirror Memoirs by donating at: http://bit.ly/MirrorMemoirs

66 CHANGING THE NARRATIVE CHANGING THE NARRATIVE 67 We are only taught how to everything from animated videos, to another something that can be so despairing. Part of people use the words “transformative justice” theater project that is focused on male- my impetus for creating any of these projects but other people say, you know, “I wish that punish each other and then assigned-at-birth survivors, to a multimedia was that so many people were disclosing to the person who harmed me could get the help dispose of one another. If art exhibit, and poetry readings. In spring me when I was a young organizer in New York that he or she needed because clearly they 2021, the plan is to release our audio archive. City, but never telling each other. I wondered were really wounded if they could hurt me that you want to live into a We have worked with a comic book illustrator, how much stronger our movements could way. I want them to never do this to someone world in which people heal Donovan Vim Crony, to create 15 portraits of be if we had a more holistic compassion for again. I want them to have to declare what the folks who chose to stay anonymous in the the entirety of what we have each survived? they did in a community that’s going to see and transform, then that archive and we have a photo collage artist, Then people could depend on one another them and witness them—and not dispose of means you need to stay in Mer Young, who is still creating some of the for things that perhaps they were forcing them—but actually hold them accountable.” beautiful portraits of people who are publicly themselves to try and weather alone before, And that’s tricky, because we are only taught relationship with them. coming out. Artist Jess X. Snow is starting to like a panic attack, an anxiety attack, or a how to punish each other and then dispose of envision artistic representations of people’s trauma-related flashback. The healing needs one another. If you want to live into a world in answers in the interviews. We plan to use these to come in intimacy and connection because which people heal and transform, then that employed or unemployed, many people living images as cover art for audio toolkits and as art the violence happens in isolation. I think there means you need to stay in relationship with with trauma-related disabilities and chronic products to become a fundraising mechanism is a particularly beautiful kind of art in weaving them. To be clear, I don’t mean the survivor illnesses, many folks who face anti-Blackness for our work to be more self-sustaining. connections between people and allowing who was directly harmed, but someone needs and white supremacy and transphobia, and for that social fabric to be woven where only to stay in relationship with them, who knows are kept out of the formal workplace for those The art component feels really important isolation and wounding existed before. what they did and can still see their humanity. reasons. For many folks, I was the first person because what Secret Survivors taught me they talked with about details of what had is that whether or not you are a survivor, Finally, Mirror Memoirs complicates the story Mirror Memoirs is partners with the Ahimsa happened to them. And that requires a lot everybody is raised in rape culture that about who does the harm. It’s really important Collective, which is another survivor-led of care, not just for the other person, but for enables a global pandemic of children being to note that most people who are raped as organization founded by Sonya Shah that myself as a survivor, because I’m obviously a raped. And so it is the job of the artist in this children do not go on to rape other people, holds restorative circles in prisons where subject of my own research as well. I’m now case to help people see the water that we but of the population of people who do, a cisgender men who have committed sexual training people who have told their stories are swimming in. Listening to Mirror Memoirs large majority of them were raped themselves violence, including childhood rape, go through in the project to record more interviews and stories is like taking the red pill in [the movie] as children. The second phenomenon that an accountability process over a year and a deliver educational workshops and keynotes, The Matrix—suddenly you can see the reality comes up in our archive, is that of the small half. I have attended two of those circles along becoming what we now call a core member. of the rape culture that we are all swimming percentage of cases that actually do go through with some of my colleagues, and it’s really Core members also get a say in shaping the in, and that can be a very overwhelming the criminal legal system, 40% of known cases powerful to recommit to the actual practice direction and form of our organization. It’s been experience. The fact that we are all socialized are juvenile to juvenile. So we have a large of abolition when you are literally sitting in a kind of a beautiful but humbling experience to know how to attend the theater, or visit an number of children who were raped or sexually circle, and shaking hands, and sharing meals, to also receive the kind of mutual aid and exhibit, or bear witness to a poetry reading, or assaulted, and then in their trauma reaction, go and spending eight hours with men who are collective care from the membership base that sit in a circle with each other, makes it a little on to commit sexual violence against a younger looking you in the face and saying, “Yeah, I I am holding space for and creating a container bit less horrifying when you have that moment child while they are still themselves a minor. A raped a child.” And also, “I was raped as a for. I am a part of this membership base, and of awakening to the reality of the violence that third phenomenon is that 9% of our survivors child, and I never got help, and I never had that shows up in my own life all the time. we are within. That’s the power of art. were raped or sexually assaulted as children a place to talk about it until I opted into this by cisgender women, but that is hardly ever voluntary program, years into my sentence.” Looking forward, in fall 2020, we are putting For survivors in our healing circles and talked about in public discourse. Even in this In order to end child sexual abuse you have our efforts into creating some toolkits under convenings, the power is in being able to come #MeToo era, there is a uni-directional arrow to completely remake the society that we are certain themes: What do we do with the people together with 30 other people to listen to each of harm that is talked about from cisgender living in, and the way that we are living with who commit child sexual abuse if we have other’s stories, engage in somatic theater men and boys towards cisgender women and and responsible for one another. an abolitionist politic?; What’s the vision for games, and do some visioning about the world girls. And that’s just not the reality of how healing and the world we want to live in?; we want to live in. People got so delighted this violence happens. That’s why I think the and specific Black experiences within the by having this permission to just focus on majority of the members in Mirror Memoirs are Amita Swadhin is an educator, storyteller, activist, Mirror Memoirs archive. In terms of the art their own healing. We have to learn how to be advocating for something different than the and consultant dedicated to fighting interpersonal components, I have a big vision that includes playful with each other, even when it is about legal/carceral system on offer today. Some and institutional violence against young people.

68 CHANGING THE NARRATIVE CHANGING THE NARRATIVE 69 EXCERPTS FROM THE MIRROR MEMOIRS ARCHIVE

If you went through a portal into another dimension in which capitalism does not exist, and your only responsibility, from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep is to heal yourself, and you have a bottomless toolbox with every material and spiritual resource you need to support that endeavor, what’s in your toolbox?

“The first thing I think is that I want to live in a going to get deported. And I wish there was a house with a lot of windows and sunlight. The place for him to go to sit with someone who house I grew up in as a child was very small, cares about him, to ask him what went wrong and was not safe to live in, so where I live is in his life and what he needs. [Pause] very important to my healing. I currently live in a studio with one window and it’s very dark When I think about my father’s story, I know and gloomy and small, and I hate it. And so that he was a very smart person, but he was that’s the first thing I need: a place I feel safe also pushed out of high school. He never and happy to live in. finished high school. When he transferred schools from New York to California, the My next thought is the work I want to do with registrar at his new high school in Los Angeles adults who are perpetrators and survivors told him that his files didn’t transfer, and she of sexual violence, survivors of child sexual kept telling him this. But when he dropped out violence specifically, but perpetrators of any of school, he went to pick up all of his records kind of sexual violence… In the past week, I’ve and his file was very thick with all of the copies been admitted and received a scholarship for a of the records that had been sent over, because grad school that I really want to go to, and I’ve this woman had been lying to him, saying his been imagining this center where clients would records weren’t there. And he destroyed the feel welcome and safe to come in. With access office, he flipped over desks and was very to food and employment opportunities— angry, because his education was taken away you can’t do any kind of healing work when from him. And so, I think of my father, I think of nothing else in your life feels safe and you lack someone who is very hurt and sad and didn’t access to basic necessities like something to have anyone in his life to support him or take eat and somewhere to be able to be warm, care of him. When I’m trying to imagine this if it’s cold outside… I think that there’s not center that I eventually want to open, I think enough emotional energy to go around. Doing of my father, and I think about what would he this kind of work takes a lot out of people, have needed when he was a child; when he and it’s very frustrating. I go back and forth was a teenager; when he was an adult that between hating my father and wishing that would have made his life happier.” Illustration of Rio by Donovan Vim Crony he was dead—I’ve moved away from that, but that’s initially where I was during the initial — Rio, a Latinx, queer, non-binary, stages of my healing—to now, I wish that he Mirror Memoirs project contributor wasn’t in prison, and I wish that he wasn’t

70 CHANGING THE NARRATIVE CHANGING THE NARRATIVE 71 EXCERPTS FROM THE MIRROR MEMOIRS ARCHIVE

What’s your personal vision for how humanity can end child sexual abuse?

“The first thing that comes to mind or whatever, there are other people who listen immediately is, this conversation about in and can maybe hear some things. I would epigenetics, which is really popular—how we love to normalize that conversation where we carry trauma. What that tells me though is that, can say “childhood sexual abuse,” we can say “Okay, if I have trauma in my genetic makeup, “rape” and “incest.” We can say all the words that also means that I have liberation in my that we need to, and not whisper it. So the genetic makeup,” and so how do I tap into people who hear it, they can just be like, “yeah” that? How do I tap into the parts that aren’t and it not be this foreign, shameful thing. always the traumatic part that people always Instead, it can be like, “That was an injustice, want to focus on? What will that look like over and we’re all collectively invested in ensuring a generation? If we do this work now and are that doesn’t happen again,” and “What do we able to impact the people in our lives who need to do?” So really, a community response, are having babies, who are raising children in at the end of the day. What’s a community whatever capacity, we can really help shift that. response to childhood sexual abuse? Because Because how amazing if in twenty years the it’s gonna be the people who do it, not just one headline is: “Epigenetics, We’re All Wired for individual or some policy or whatever.” Liberation and Freedom and Victory.” That to me is a success. Just emancipating ourselves — Bianca Laureano, from these ideas that we’re constantly carrying Mirror Memoirs project contributor all these negative things, and we’re made up of this negative stuff or these negative experiences.

I don’t know, maybe it sounds really woo woo, witchy or whatever, but also this larger collective divine power. I don’t know where it comes from, I don’t know where it stems from, but we all have it. And really doing the work collectively. Just like you said, intergenerationally, I feel like transnationally— just worldwide. It’s totally possible. Especially as children of migrants or immigrants, we can also take this back to our homelands or to the rituals that we have in our lives and the ways that we talk about it. So that’s really exciting for me too. Photo collage of project contributor Bianca Laureano by Mer Young I think also having more open conversations, just wherever we are. Whenever I’m out with friends, I do a lot of sex coaching over a meal

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mean for a Black or brown child to be raised to reach adulthood in a VI. Mutual aid economies—another world is possible world in which communities of color live in segregated neighborhoods with poor access to food and with poisoned air, water, soil? A world in We are figuring out what our institutions cannot. I have watched artists which police roam the streets and the schools in an open act of war figure out how to create supply chains for face masks and face shields7 against Black and brown people?3 with more effectiveness and fewer resources than Jeff Bezos. Faced with images of farmers dumping mountains of potatoes due to the Protest is reproductive labor insofar as it creates the conditions for breakdown of trucking systems, we are learning how to grow our own those of us who were not meant to survive, to live another day. Protest food. Somehow, despite the highest unemployment rates since the Great recognizes that white supremacist capitalism is a death cult and protest Depression, we have raised millions of dollars for bail and emergency says let us rupture our reality so that we may live. relief funds. Confined to our homes for months, it’s no wonder that we in the United In some ways, I do think that we are learning what truly constitutes States have erupted in protest over state sanctioned killing of Black essential labor, and what does not. May the labor that you are people. For reproductive labor requires time and space much as all performing right now during the pandemic be considered the most labor does. The traditional capitalist work week leaves no time for essential moving forward.8 In addition to the labor of essential workers contemplating the death structures4 of society and how they might on the frontline, may we hold these acts of checking in our neighbors, be changed. It is only through a catastrophe of unemployment, or creating systems of local support, growing food, reading Ursula K. withdrawal from the formal labor economy, that we are finally able to Leguin,9 sitting still with our feelings of unease, as essential. turn our attention to the labor of transforming society. Is protest the social reproduction strike we have been waiting for? The world is on fire, and we are also creating the world that we want to rise from the ashes. The Brooklyn Museum has become a food V. Abolition as the possibility of reproduction pantry during the pandemic, and to be honest, I hope every large arts institution that furloughed their workers and was inaccessible to Abolition, then, is a disinvestment from the necropolitical machinery communities of color and poor people becomes public bathrooms for of the state, and an investment in the conditions of life.5 COVID-19 does protesters, shelters for unhoused people, daycares for working women, not discriminate, but our state structures do when it comes to who can emergency medical centers, community gardens, and more. access medical care, who is still required to go to work, who experiences the rapid spread of COVID-19 behind bars, and who experiences the rapid VII. Moving at the speed of disability spread of COVID-19 when the state calls in a militarized police force to kettle protesters instead of letting them go. Most days prior to the pandemic I was a depressed human trash can, and still am one. I’ve spent years fine-tuning my life to accommodate Abolition is about more than defunding the police. Abolition is about my bouts of clinical depression—remote contract working, working investing in the social reproduction structures of society—education, at odd hours of the night, neurotically stocking my pantry with non- physical and mental wellness, economic stability, community resilience.6 perishables, amassing a wide range of Instant Pot recipes that require Abolition is a vision that reorganizes what we have come to understand 5 minutes of physical effort,10 and cancelling or rescheduling meetings as safety and what we understand to be social divisions of labor. because “emotions,” aka hours spent in bed wrestling with thoughts of Everyone can, and should be an abolitionist. suicidality.

------7. Shoutout to Auntie Sewing Squad and #3DPPEArtistNetwork 3. This is the premise of reproductive justice, a concept originally articulated by 8. Quarantine reading: Take Back the Economy, by J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny women of color reproductive justice collective Sister Song Cameron, and Stephen Healy 4. Quarantine reading: The Necropolitics of COVID-19 by Christopher J. Lee 9. Quarantine reading: The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Leguin 5. Quarantine reading: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, Golden Gulag, by 10. Instant Pot congee (粥): 1 part rice, 8 parts water. Pressure cook for 20 minutes. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba on twitter @prisonculture Natural release. Suggested toppings: Sesame oil, soy sauce, furikake, green 6. Quarantine reading: 8toabolition.com onion, ginger, pickled vegetables, fermented tofu, fried egg, century egg

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Now almost everyone is on depression time. Almost every remote work Remember that when we are fighting for the possibility of a future, we call begins with a fifteen minute debrief of how the pandemic is touching are also fighting to hold ourselves in all the messiness, the uncertainty of us today, a mini-therapy session before we halfheartedly reprise our the present. For the sake of your future self, unravel. roles in a matinee performance of productivity under capitalism. Almost every remote worker is working odd hours and cancelling meetings because of extenuating circumstances. Projects move at the speed of IX. Disabled and queer kinship—making kin in molasses, or at least the speed it takes for someone to will themselves the Chthulucene12 out of bed, confront the immense anxiety of living in a dying world, attend to work, and repeat. How many of us, honestly, live within a functioning nuclear family? Who is the nuclear family for? It isn’t for those of us who have been cast Yes, it does suck to get a taste of my own medicine. I suppose I’m sorry out of our families because of our sexuality. It isn’t for those of us who for all the times I used to flake out and procrastinate on deadlines. But face legal barriers to adoption and other forms of non-heterosexual I’m also not sorry that we are learning to view our colleagues through reproduction. It isn’t for those of us who have had family members the possibility that everyone might be affected by mass psychic trauma, deported, incarcerated, killed. It isn’t for those of us who are living on and adjusting our email salutations accordingly. I’m not sorry that we couches and spare beds to escape a violent home. are learning that the pace of capitalism is incompatible with the pace of disability, which has been the pace of life for some of us. I want to move I think people of color, queers, and disabled folks are a little bit better at a speed that doesn’t kill us. at making kin than others. We know that the nuclear family is a conditioning mythology rather than a workable reality. We also know VIII. Intergenerational trauma is the somatic that making kin, making social bonds that catch us in a community safety net when we can’t access a social safety net, is how we will reproduction of violence survive.

I am so scared of people running away from their trauma right now Pandemic asks us to seriously consider with whom we’re making kin. because I am the anchor runner in a familial relay race of trauma so long Who is essential, who is family when we can only gather in groups of that the racetrack spans generations. Overworking is a trauma response six or less? Who is family not because of blood relation, but because of and overworking is also a way to avoid trauma responses. Overworking is our mutual promise to care for each other? Who helps you reproduce, the cousin of shutting down, the only two options available to us when for real for real? Disability studies and transformative justice thinker we feel our sense of safety taken away.11 And truly, who can feel safe Mia Mingus refers to this as mapping your pods.13 Apply adrienne maree right now? How long must—no, how long can we live with our nervous brown’s theory of the power of the fractal14 to pods, and we might find system stretched between these two poles of total shutdown and total ourselves emerging from this pandemic within a reorganized society of activation, without knowing what respite, connection, care, feels like? infinitesimal small units operating under care agreements. How long can we go without putting our hands to another person’s heart to let their breathing calm ours, and vice versa? I am hopeful that we will learn how to recognize and make kin beyond the limitations of blood ties. I hope that we see ourselves as existing I am scared that you think this trauma will only last for as long until the within care agreements to care for a larger sense of community—and to economy reopens. I am scared that you think you’re OK. I am scared care through loving, rigorous steps towards justice. I think that’s the only because my dear friend told me that in post-Katrina New Orleans, 2006 way that we can get through this. By recognizing our kin. was the year the grief came, but 2008 was the year people who fought to hold things together started dying. I am scared that the unaddressed shock and grief of this moment will burrow itself so deep in our bodies ------that it becomes part of our cell tissue, and part of the cell tissue of future 12. Quarantine reading: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by generations. Donna Haraway 13. Quarantine reading: Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet by Mia Mingus, ------https://transformharm.org/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/ 11. Quarantine reading: The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy by Deb Dana 14. Quarantine reading: Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown

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